Should I Keep RAW Files for Old Photos?

[Sir Topham Hatt]

The archivist in me says yes but I'm not so sure.

 

My camera takes a RAW photo and a JPEG (although thinking of switching to RAW only - but that will come with it's own problems in the future).

 

Been going through a lot of old photos from 2005 - 2013 or so and using a piece of software - nameexif to rename the files the same as my phone - IMG_YYYYMMDD_MM:SS as I use my phone more often than not these days.

It doesn't change the name of RAW files though.  For some of the early photos and snapshots, I've just deleted the raw file and stuck with saving the JPEG as I took only a few photos back then that had a raw and jpeg saved.  The earlier I get, the more jpegs there are.
The later years (2014 - 2017) sees an increase of raw and jpegs but the very recent years (2018 +) sees nearly no raw photos as the camera on my phone has been pretty good, so most of the time I don't use the bulky dSLR anyway.  2020 has seen NO use from it at all.

 

I've looked online and some say they don't bother with raw files anymore and just edit the jpeg (even pros!) (as photoshop allows you to open the jpeg with most of the options it serves to raw files).  Some say they always save the raw file.  But the piece of software that I have, that automatically renames filenames to dates doesn't work for raw files (is there one, as simple as the one above?).

 

I have one of two options:

 

1) Delete the raw files as I'm unlikely to really need them and the jpegs are pretty good.  Also means I can save space on the hard drive.  Switch the camera to saving jpegs only and be done with raw files.

 

2) Find a piece of software that can rename both jpegs and raw files to the date they were taken (in the format above).  Take only raw photos as I'd edit them anyway, then save as a jpeg to print out.

 

Going through and manually renaming the raw files isn't really an option as there's hundreds, if not thousands.
But I like the jpegs to be named as the date so they fit with all the other files.  They're already in yearly folders so there is a slim possibility that I could just leave those photos that have an accompanying jpeg file in the "old format" style name, then just take jpegs with the dSLR from now on.

I wonder if I'm really asking whether taking raw photos is worth it these days.

 

Any advice?

Edited August 28, 2020 by Sir Topham Hatt