Photography

For personal photos, what do you all do with the originals (i.e. unedited) and imperfect photos?

In the summer I took a course on photography so I'm very new. My primary goal is to take pictures of my family.

Currently, I edit using Google Photos and I store all my pictures there, and the edits are stored as copies. I typically organise the edits into albums.

However, I'm left with the decision of what to do with the originals of the ones I did edit, and the ones I didn't - because there was something minor wrong with them (no eye contact, some slight blur, something or someone weird in the background or whatever.)

I can't bring myself to delete any of them, the voice in my head is "even if they're not perfect, who cares? you'll want to look at all of these anyway when you're old".. but if I don't come up with a plan or decide what to do with them soon, I know I'll create a big task later down the line of pruning through thousands, and likely paying for more cloud storage anyway.

I know if I store these locally (i.e. not the cloud) I can mitigate the factor of cost, but unless I store them all on a NAS with some reasonable RAID config and then a backup to the cloud, I won't feel comfortable doing it any other way. Storing them all on one external HDD is asking for trouble. At this point, "mitigating the cost" is out the window as I would have paid up front for a lot hardware, new disks over time as they die, and cloud storage (again) for backup.

As I type this, I'm starting to realise this is in fact the actual cost of photography. I guess I need to draw a line somewhere; if I don't want local hardware, then suck it up and only keep "the good ones" in Google Photos.