BatchFoxI'd just bought ANOTHER M.2 NVMe drive and watched the price of that shiny new Samsung 980 skyrocket (no shade to Samsung, I love their drives), and I finally had to ask myself if this was sustainable. Keep buying drives forever, or start deleting shoots I'd fallen in love with?
And I'd been down this road for a while. It started with local hard drives. Then external USB storage, which got way too slow. After a big wrestling meet or a combat sports shoot I might come home with 8,000 RAWs, and unless I wanted to leave a USB drive plugged in while I went to the movies, had dinner, slept, and woke up to it finishing in the morning, I had to do something else.
So I went to NVMe, and got greeted with the beautiful cost of all that speed. When the bloat monster finally got out of control, I built a 60 TB NAS for roughly $1,600. I preordered a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro at launch pricing, added Samsung NVMe M.2s and a bunch of SATA drives to reach 60 TB, then put a 10 Gb card in my PC and bought a 10 Gb switch, just to beat the slow USB problem and the space problem at the same time. Between the NAS, the drives and the upgrades, even that got expensive.
There had to be a better way. That's when I went hunting in the other direction.
If you shoot a lot, you know the feeling. Every card you empty is another chunk of drive you're never getting back.
There are really four ways to make RAW files take up less room. I've shot compressed RAW, I've zipped folders, I've tried DNG a handful of times, and I've bought more drives than I want to count. Here's what each one gets you, and what it costs you.
1. Shoot compressed RAW in camera
Most cameras have it now. It's free, and it works starting with your next photo.
Just check which kind your camera uses, because some compressed modes throw data away.
I shot compressed for a while. On my Sony, the lossy option meant smaller files but threw data away, and the lossless option kept everything but killed my burst speed. When you shoot fast action, a slower burst means missing the moment that actually mattered. So I did my research and went uncompressed, to keep every bit of room for editing without giving up speed. Between combat sports, events, candids, portraits and wildlife, and still being pretty new to editing, I wanted all the potential I could get to bring each photo to what I saw in my head.
If your camera's lossless compressed mode keeps up with how you shoot, it's a great choice for new shoots. It just doesn't do anything for the years of uncompressed files already sitting on your drives.
2. Zip the folder
The good part: you keep your exact originals. The bad part: you barely save anything. RAW files are mostly sensor noise, and zip looks for repeating patterns that noise just doesn't have. On RAW your camera already compressed, a zip often saves under 1%.
Oh, and you can't preview anything inside it either.
3. Convert to DNG
This is the advice you'll see the most. The big savings come from lossy DNG, which throws data away. Lossless DNG keeps everything and saves a modest amount.
Either way, the file you end up with isn't the file your camera wrote. You can tuck the original inside the DNG to get it back later, but that adds the whole original back on, so you've saved nothing.
4. Archive with something built for RAW
This is the one I built, because none of the first three gave me what I wanted: the space back AND my exact original back.
BatchFox Archive makes your RAW files smaller, and when you restore on the default Exact setting you get your original camera file back byte for byte, checked with a SHA-256 fingerprint. On the Sony files we've promoted so far it makes them up to 71.69% smaller, and most shots land around half. Even RAW your camera already compressed gets smaller, up to 25.1% proven on a Nikon Zf shooting lossless NEF.
How much smaller the files get
And getting your photos back is always free. Restore works on every plan, even after the beta.
So which one should you pick?
- Only care about future shoots? Turn on lossless compressed RAW in your camera, as long as it keeps up with how you shoot.
- Never going to need the original file again? Lossy DNG saves the most.
- Want your originals back exactly AND real space saved? That's what I built BatchFox for.
BatchFox is in beta and I'm looking for photographers to try it on real shoots. Sign up at batchfox.app.
What have you tried so far?