Storage management strategies after uploading to INat?

My first time asking on the Forum, how exciting!!!

My question to all my fellow INatters out there: How do you go about with regards to storing your photos after uploading to INat? Do you delete most of the shots, all of them, or do you just save up for tons of hard drives or cloud storage?

I shoot in RAW on my Canon 90D, which, after a day out biobashing and photographing almost every living thing I can find, adds up to quite the amount of data and storage space used. The photos are obviously not focussed on the beauty aspect of photography, so the shots are mostly useless from a photographic point of view. But from a scientific point of view, they are of quite some value. When I get home, I choose the best shots, convert them to JPeg, crop those shots, then upload them to Inat. I then keep these shots on my hard drive, because you never know when they might come in useful to someone else, or yourself. Various times in the past someone from Inat contacted me and requested a full-resolution shot (or even a tight crop on the tibia of a beetle) of what seemed to me like an average shot of a common bug.

This is all good and well but it quickly leads to a storage problem. I currently have roughly 6 TB of hard drive space taken up mostly by crappy to average shots of common to not-so-common creatures.

My question thus, are there any alternatives, is it worth keeping all of the shots, or is investing in lots of storage space the only way?

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-do-you-organize-your-photos/8217

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/naturtag-organize-your-photo-collection-with-inat-metadata/33959
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/database-for-photos/5365
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-hoarders-anonymous-hello-my-name-is-broacher-and/34764
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-to-do-with-photos/6188
I’m sure there was another big topic.

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Not where I thought I’d be quoting my computer architecture professor, but as he says, “Storage is cheap. Hindsight is expensive”
Aka better to save stuff you don’t need than to not save and need it later. And with how relatively cheap hardware storage is these days(mostly TB+ drives), I say keep em. Invest in a few external drives, label them with dates to easily cross-ref with obvs

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