Annual Photo and Video Storage

Out of curiosity, I charted my year-over-year hard drive storage of photos and videos. This was a relatively simple exercise since I store all of my photos and videos in parent folders named by year, so all I had to do was have the operating system calculate each folder's size. I did make some minor adjustments--for example, in 2013 I made a video of a vacation that I took back in 2002, and I stored the video in the 2002 folder, but since I created the content in 2013, I re-allocated that storage space from 2002 to 2013. So essentially the following graphic depicts storage space based on year of content creation:

As you can see, there is an upward trend of storage space consumption. This is not surprising because with each new camera purchased, along came more megapixels. Additionally, in late 2009 when my daughter was born, I began shooting in RAW (actually RAW + JPG). I believe that the combination of baby photos and the addition of RAW files sufficiently explains the jump in storage space between 2009 and 2010.

Not depicted in the figure are some milestones related to video capture. In 10/2009, I purchased a Polaroid DVG-1080P camcorder to capture videos of my then soon-to-be-born daughter. In 5/2011, I upgraded my camcorder to a Canon VIXIA HF M301 which performed much better in low light and had a far superior image stabilization feature.

There appears to be slightly higher storage space consumed in 2005 as compared with the next few years, and I attribute that to our wedding and honeymoon in April and May of 2005 where we not surprisingly generated lots of photo and video content.

Prior to 2005, I shot digital photos with a Canon PowerShot A70 (7/2003 to 6/2005), my first digital camera. However, the storage space was negligible on the above scale. I also used a Canon EOS Rebel S to shoot 35 mm film from approximately mid-1992 to mid-2003, and while I did scan all my negatives and save them as JPG files, that storage space was also negligible.

For the first half of 2016, I am at around 250 GB of storage, so extrapolation to a full year would land me at around 500 GB.  Therefore, it looks like I am leveling off at approximately half a terabyte annually. I suppose this is useful for me to know so I can estimate when I will need to buy additional external hard drives to back up my photo and video content.