For home/family photographers--do you delete photos?

[Hyun]

This question is primarily for the parents and family photographers among us. Do you actively go through your photos and delete the ones that "didn't turn out"? Slightly blurry, shots in continuous bursts that are near-identical, bad lighting/exposure, etc.

I've always been "storage is cheap" kind of photographer who believe in keeping everything I shoot, and have had a hard time deleting the non-keepers, especially after our son was born three years ago. Even the poor shots remind me of the occasion, the circumstances, and I guess have sentimental values to me. The flipside to this is that I have almost 140,000 photos in my family album (maybe about 20,000 of those are duplicates, as I switched from shooting RAW only to RAW+JPG some time ago), and have just outgrown my 750GB photo album hard drive!

So I'm just curious as to what your habits are!

[eddarr]

You have to get rid of the shots that don't cut the mustard. Storage is cheap but organizing all of those is a pain. There is no reason to keep duplicates or blurry shots. Force yourself to hit the delete button.

[Eagle]

Get rid of the ones that are blurry/out of focus. Lighting try to fix with software, then decide if it looks good enough or not. If not trash it.

shots in continuous bursts that are near-identical,
Don't use continuous burst, it's not necessary. I believe the best thing anyone can do is pretend your shooting film and try to get it right in the camera. Learn your camera and learn how to set your shot up.

[BearLeeAlive]

...and have just outgrown my 750GB photo album hard drive!
You do have 2 of them, right? One for backup should the other fail.

I have become brutal. OOF, poor composition, bad lighting, etc all get deleted right away. When there are multiple shots of the same subject, at the same time, I thin these out too. If I like it enough to bother processing it, I keep it, if I would not likely ever use it for anything it goes in the recycle bin.

[Hyun]

You do have 2 of them, right? One for backup should the other fail.

Yes, I'm good on backups. One complete backup set on my wife's computer, then another set distributed over three older external USB drives.

So I seem to be a minority here when it comes to keeping everything. I look forward to more comments.

[kevin_c]

Regardless of whether it's family or a landscape etc. - If the shot is out of focus, blurred, not exposed correctly etc. etc. It gets binned!
BUT - If the shot is a real gem and/or is the only one of a family member or whatever, I'd keep it regardless of it's quality.

[Karl C]

Don't use continuous burst, it's not necessary...Learn your camera and learn how to set your shot up.

Exactly. Why are you using continuous burst for family photos? 140k photos?

No need to "spray and pray" nor take a shot of every little thing. Learn how to capture and master the "decisive moment". Additionally, try this exercise - force yourself to limit shooting to 36 exposures; think like film shooters.

Just because you have xGB card doesn't mean you need to use all of it.

[kevin_c]

Exactly. Why are you using continuous burst for family photos? 140k photos?

No need to "spray and pray" nor take a shot of every little thing. Learn how to capture and master the "decisive moment". Additionally, try this exercise - force yourself to limit shooting to 36 exposures; think like film shooters.

Just because you have xGB card doesn't mean you need to use all of it.

Some sound advice from Karl ;)

[Hyun]

Thanks for all the good advice. I do see what you guys are saying about my indiscriminate shooting is actually holding me back as far as becoming a more disciplined and skilled photographer.

As for the "why" of using continuous shooting... I have a very busy toddler! :-D

[rklepper]

I never get rid of any. After my wife passed away, even the bad or blurry ones took on more meaning. If you do not want to store them, at least archive them somewhere.

[KYmom]

When I take several of the same, I go through and delete out the bad and only keep the good. I even go back to by old ones and re-evaluate the ones I kept. Sometime's I look at some and say " geez what was I thinking for keeping that one" LOL....

[BigBlueDodge]

I regularly cull my photos. If I took maybe a couple of hundred per year, I would keep everyone, but I take thousands per year so it's not a question of having enough photo's of the family. I do realize that space is cheap, but a bad picture is a bad picture, no matter if it's stored on a 300GB hard drive or 1TB hard drive.

Now my procedure is that I always keep my photo's on two computers and periodically sync the two, to make sure they are up to date with each other. When I go through a culling run, I will wait about a week or so before I sync with the other computer just to make sure I want to get rid of the pictures. Since it is backed up on the other computer, if I change my mind it's not lost. But 99.9% of the time, my gut is right, and if I delete a picture it is gone for good.

[GilesGuthrie]

After every shoot I run a Lightroom slideshow, during which I rate the images, one to 5, based on quality, interest, rarity, difficulty, potential to use in the future, etc. Anything that's less than 3 stars gets deleted (yes, Peter Krogh, I've read your book and I know what you're saying, but this works for me).

The thing is, the slideshow is a 7-second interval. So an image has 7 seconds to sell itself to me, or for me to find something wrong with it. Missed focus, missed pans, something unexpectedly in the way etc, all get binned.

Interestingly, as I've practiced, the number of insta-bins has gone down, and the number of potential-publish has gone up a little, so there is a huge tranche of 3-star images, and an increasing number of 4s and 5s.

The process works well for all types of shooting, but where the shooting was harder, the spread of ratings differs quite dramatically. I was at a hillclimb over the weekend and insta-binned around 30% of the day's catch. But the ones I'll show from the event are near 20% of the catch, which is much better for me.

[steved110]

I only delete stuff that is badly OOF or blurred, or shows people looking bad, like with eyes shut and mouth open.

I never spray and pray, owing to an aversion to PP and editing, so i don't have to decide which is the best of 20 near identical shots. If they all look the same I'll pick what i think is the best, and keep one or two of a short sequence.

But as for permanently deleting something because of a minor flaw - well, usually not. That image might be precious one day, you never know what might happen.

[GSansoucie]

I *used* to keep them all (I am an archival nut). But then I got overwhelmed with managing them. Trying to go back a few months to find a shot was a nightmare because I kept so many. . .

At the beginning of the year (as I started using Lightroom), I started a new workflow.

I have always downloaded my photos in to a folder structure that is Year/Month (so 2008/January, 2008/February, etc). I continue this practice, copy all new photos into the correct year/month folder.

I then immediately (from Lightroom) archive all the imported photos to a monthly/DVD folder (I monitor the folder sizes, when they get to be about 4.1 GB, I create a new DVD folder for the month). Technically I archive the images into a "DNG" sub folder of the DVD-number folder (more on that later).

I then go through the newly imported photos and tag the photos (thumbs up - keeper, thumbs down, dump it).

After I have pruned all my shots into a very manageable group (sometimes I keep only one) AND I've done all my edits & Post Processing, I select all the rejected photos and delete them (delete them from the catalog AND hard drive).

On the first of the next month, I burn off my archive folders to DVD (which is easy as I have managed the folder sizes throughout the month). Before I actually burn the folders onto the DVDs, I use Exiftool to rip out each DNG's jpg thumbnail and copy the jpg to the parent folder (So the jpgs are in the 'DVD-number' folder with the RAW's in a DNG sub-folder. When I burn the DVD, I burn the contents of each DVD folder, resulting in a bunch of jpg preview images on the root of the DVD and their corresponding DNG in the DNG subfolder. This makes finding the raw image even easier on systems that might not have a Raw viewer.

I then archive the entire month's keepers (photos that remain in Lightroom) as a Lightroom catalog - to a DVD.

I am on a Mac, running OS-X & Time Machine, so all my photos & catalogs are backed up hourly.

Once in a while, I make a complete copy of my folder structure (onto an external drive).

The end result is I am left with only my keepers in Lightroom, I don't have to wade through tons of crap. IF I get one of those "Oh my God! I really need to find that blurry photo of my thumb and grass from March!" (if there was, in fact, grass in March) moments, I can sift through my Archive DVD's from March to find the photo in question.

I like this workflow so much, that I am slowly going backwards in time and archiving each month, then pruning away the "crap".

[tomek_wap]

Hi,

When I do some photo outing, and come back with lets say 200 photos I delete the ones that didn't come out, or are not particularly interesting.
And that would leave me with 10-15 good photos, few of those I would upload to my website and online photo gallery.

As for pictures from holidays, where I can shoot up to 500-1000 photos, I would leave about 75% of them, burn on DVD - I don't like keeping GBs of photos on my HDD.

T.

[Sean]

Chop Chop Chop. I delete photo's left and right. I TRY and fix them, if I can. If I am totally done fore, then I just delete. Plus ones that are OOF or technically junk get the axe. I am not a pro.

[canonnoob]

I will usually keep the raw files and the PSD files in a different folder, but keep the Jpegs in the same folder for the shoot... my storage kinda is like this...

External harddrive menu > Photos > Unfinished or Finished > Put into catagories (such as Client shoots, landscapes, sports Etc) > Familys name or whatever the shoot was for > Folders for : Jpeg and Raw/PSD (raw and psd in the same folder)

So a good example of this would be:

EHD menu > Photos > MSU Sports > MSU Basketball > Mens > MSU VS AK (Akansas)- (Jpegs will most likely be right in this folder) > PSD/RAW folder


I hope this kinda helps.. as for deleting.. I usually get rid of shots that wont make the cut either way... ones that I know I wont process or ones that I know just arent good enough to make it to my website..

[trw]

I try to delete those that are very poor. I don't delete those that seem to be duplicates. I have not been backing up my hard drive and am searching for a external hard drive as we speak.

[FlyingPhotog]

Bad fun photos fall to the same standards as bad "serious" photos...

There's no need to keep a bad photo of a relative any more than there is a reason to keep a bad photo of a bird or sunset.

[rowdyred94]

I use Lightroom, but I still thin my kid photos quite a bit. For the first few years of their lives I kept everything. Then I got to thinking about how few photos I have of myself as a kid, and how ridiculously many I have of my kids.

Ask yourself this: If, in ten or twenty years you're looking through a set of photos, would you expect to miss the shots you're considering deleting? The answer is no, of course. You're going to be thrilled to have the thousands of shots that you keep, and cleaning house won't diminish that experience one bit.

Chuck 'em.

[[CaliGirl]]

I am very new to the world of photgraphy, so I don't delete any right now. I like to look at all the "bad" photos to try to figure out why I could not compose that shot properly. It's helpful to go back even 1 month to see the kinds of images I was producing in copmarison to the ones I have that are recent. I am able to track my own growth. I'm sure this will not always be the case. As my knowledge grows and my skills improve, I will use my trash bin more frequently.

[FocalPrincess]

I love taking shots of my kids, but there are still some horrible ones where you've only got the corner of their chin in the shot...and I've already taken plenty of shots of my living room... ;) So yes, there's times I do cull some of them.

[jsinon]

The first thing I do with all my images is a trip through the "Quick Check Tool" in DPP. Sometimes at least a third and as many as half don't make it past the first round, OOF, motion blur, they just don't do it for me, what ever. They are gone. Then I will look at ones that may have printing/enlargement in their future and those I will save the RAWs. All the "snapshots" get the basic raw treatment, exposure, WB, picture style, etc. Then they are resized to a good web/email size and saved as jpegs. The raws for these "snapshots" are then deleted.

[DrMitch]

Most of the bad ones don't make it out of my camera. Ho-hum ones MIGHT get backed up, but eventually deleted off my computer. I have 2 portable hard-drives - I prefer the small 2.5" ones - I had one of thebigger ones, fell about 2 ft MAX - dead - all photos gone - unfortunately, it was then only copy I had of those as I had a computer hard drive failure and the backup broke before I got them to my new computer!! :(