Do you eat your digital pics RAW…

…or do you cook them until they’re JPEG?

I had a great time talking to Matt and James at Interwoven today about RAW image formats.  (Sorry if I went overboard guys!) You see, we all have digital SLRs and were pondering the usefulness of RAW images.

My jury is still out there debating. Do I keep them or do I trash them? I’ve been shooting JPEG+RAW which amounts to about ~14 MB per shot and as of right now I’m running low on hard drive space since I’ve been keeping the RAW files (actually .CR2 files since I’ve got a Canon 20D). What I’d like to find out is if the general majority of folks keep these files, don’t get them to begin with, or do their post processing and then get rid of them?

Part of my problem in wondering what to do with these files is that there’s a tremendous effort involved in looking at each one of these files and exporting them to JPEG/TIFF/PSD, etc. I really hope Adobe’s RAW format proposal gets accepted because then there might be a better software solution for dealing with all of these files (I could just keep the RAWs and only get JPEGs when I need to create a web gallery). You see, most of the photo album software I’ve seen doesn’t read RAW files so I’m definitely in a bind.

I found a good article that talks about the trade offs: https://www.nikonians.org/html/resources/guides/digital/jpeg_tiff_or_raw_4.html. Here's another article that refers back to a Microsoft site that talks about managing your RAW files....looks like I'll have to try this one: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/expert/rawfiles.mspx 

I think for the interim my solution is going to buy a bigger hard drive so I can continue to store both. J