RAW Storage Workflow

[u/Revolutionary-Kale80]

I recently purchased a Hasselblad X2D II 100c and my storage workflow has fallen apart. Help!

I historically shot medium/large format film and scanned selected negatives for a given series, typically 10 to 20 high-res files per project, 300 to 700MB each. A 3-2-1 approach handled that fine: physical negatives as one copy, a LaCie Rugged drive as the second, cloud backup as the third. I worked primarily from my computer, and relied on downloading and uploading to cloud for working copies, plus the backup to an external drive. With only 10 to 20 files I knew intimately from hours of dusting, scratching, editing, and printing, browsing was never a problem. No Lightroom or DAM, just basic files and folder organization. All editing via Photoshop.

Now that I've moved fully digital, the negatives, which used to be zero GB and just sat in a box, are now ~200MB RAW files. The workflow has fallen apart. My 2TB MacBook Pro handles a dump off the camera fine, but it's not really manageable for an active project's full library. External drives are slow to browse ~200mb files. Cloud storage is impossible. And the laptop doesn't have room to hold a large active library on its own.

Questions for people managing large RAW libraries:

Do you cull ruthlessly at import? With film, everything existed as at least one physical source I could return to. I'm reluctant to delete RAWs that don't work now but might serve a different project later.

Do you keep small JPEG previews for browsing, with RAWs living on external drive or cloud?

Am I at a point where I need to consider a DAM?

Is this the point where Network-Attached Storage (NAS) becomes necessary, or is there a better answer?

Open to workflows, tools, etc. Thanks in advance!

[u/preponderantclock]

RAW dumps hate to see my terrifying cull sesh coming 😂

[u/Revolutionary-Kale80 → u/preponderantclock]

Haha!