I got asked a simple question this weekend while I was shooting a game: How long do you keep your sports photos?

Honestly… I don’t have a perfect rule. Never have. For clients who purchase, I tend to hold onto quite a bit. Storage is cheap—well, kind of. An 8TB SAS drive runs around $120–$170 depending on the brand. And having a Dell T7900 with eight bays means I can run four 8TB SAS drives in RAID 10 and get 16TB of redundant storage. Or risk RAID 5 and squeeze out 24TB. But that’s beside the point.

What surprised me recently is when I looked back and realized I have almost nothing archived from the past two years of basketball. Football? I still have this past season, but I’ll probably delete it soon. When I started out, I preserved everything. Maybe a part of me thought someone, someday, might inquire about old photos. What I found out is that huge archives are hard to search. Without a filing system or spreadsheets, you’re lost in thousands of frames.

I archived some images in the cloud—Amazon Photos, iCloud—but the problem is the same: imagine someone asking, “Hey, do you have photos of this player from two seasons ago?” Then I’m digging through 75 games worth of images from 2023–2024, including AIA and NMAA state championships. Sometimes I photographed the same team multiple times. Searching through all that becomes a chore.

And the truth is, I don’t like deleting my work. I keep small batches—maybe a few key players or a handful of key moments. Usually it’s for when a local paper needs a feature photo of an athlete moving on to the next level. But beyond that, my archival window has really narrowed. One season. After that, it’s gone.

My workflow is heavy enough as it is—writing, editing, publishing, delivering to clients. Once we submit and get paid, that’s the end of those photos. It covers the trip, the experience, and maybe some gear costs. But the pace of change in sports is fast. Attention moves quickly. If photos aren’t published or sold in that window, they just become occupied space.

In three years of sports photography, I’ve only had three requests for old photos.

And let’s be real—accessibility plays a role now. At almost every game, there are multiple cameras, cell phones, livestreams, TikTok feeds, and school media teams producing their own content. Last week, while editing paid client material, I watched SportZone’s coverage of Chinle vs. Winslow on YouTube. Then scrolled through TikTok and counted at least five different live streams—from five different angles—with commentary that wasn’t half bad. Navajo Times photographers were there. Local media students were there. Everybody is capturing something.

The question should be asked of them also, are they storing all their content? Let's keep the focus on me.

So my answer? One season.

That’s my archive. I don’t expect to photograph 75 games this year. I’m stepping back a little, letting Truman take the lead. He’s learning the ropes, and he’s capable. I’ll still shoot, of course, but right now my focus has shifted more toward writing—though even that feels like it might be temporary.

Another story for another day.