What photos do you keep??

[MatthewK]

Hello all, ravenous shooter here :cool: I've had my camera since march and have well over 3k pictures on my HD. I've already culled a good number, but it becomes a mind numbing exercise, trying to decide what to keep for future use, or those that I will not give a second look at. I've noticed in my shooting that out of my sets, I regard 1 or 2 as 'excellent' photos, and the others 'so-so', and about 10% are discarded due to typical reasons (under/over exposure, blurry, bad shot).

So, do you all keep a gigantic pool of pictures which you may or may not use, or do you only keep the "keepers" and discard the rest? If a picture has a great subject but less than stellar characteristics (slight blur maybe), do you automatically throw it out?

At this rate I am going to have hundreds of Gigs of pictures before too long, at which point the collection will become rather unwieldy, but I don't want to get rid of something I may regret later.

[lungdoc]

You will get answers here that are all over the map. Obviously varies if amateur vs. pro (pro will presumably keep most shots that meet a certain standard and aren't duplicates). As an amateur I keep almost all (except obvious failure) family shots, never know when it might be handy. I discard a lot of duplicates/lesser shots if I am taking shots of say scenery or a sunrise - who wants to see 20 shots of the sunrise...I'll keep 5 or 6 and chuck the rest. If shooting to prove a technique or test a lens etc, I'll chuck most. In general the less sentimental/emotional or time sensitive the subject matter the more I am likely to discard. Having grown up on film I don't take nearly the volume you are talking about however.

[Mark_Cohran]

I don't keep any obvious duds (OOF, poorly exposed, misfires, etc.), but I'll generally keep shots that are variations of the same pose. One lesson to learn, is to be selective in what you shoot. That's a lesson, I'm still learning even after many years of shooting.

[rral22]

I keep what I like, and I keep what might sell. The rest I chuck.

I also don't shoot by the hundreds. I am an old guy that learned photography shooting film so I am more "careful" about when I trip the shutter. I think that if the number of pictures you are shooting is creating a problem for you, the first thing you should do is stop taking so many.

[Scottes]

Checking my hard drive, and considering the digital cameras I've owned, I have taken:
10D - 10,746 pics
20D - 27,052 pics
50D - 1,350 pics

Out of the 39,138 pictures I've taken, I have saved 11,735 on my hard drive, and deleted the rest. I could delete another 7,000 to 9,000 if I spent a few hours in front of the computer.

Out of those 11,735 photos on my drive, I have 37 pictures that I am really proud of, and have maximum (ie; correct) sharpness, exposure, and composition, and do not need very much cropped off to make for a good composition.

37 out of 39,000. 1 out of a thousand. Less than 0.1%.
Gawd I suck. :D

Lowering my standards a bit, I have 387 that are under consideration for re-processing, and a place in a SmugMug gallery. But I have not yet finished culling those shots, and I'd be surprised if 150 make it into the gallery.


3.5 years of shooting, 39,000 shots, and I have 150 pictures that are worth my time to re-process and post in a show-off gallery.

I'd say that I take a lot of shots, but I do a lot of birding (which results in bursts of shots), a lot of panoramics and HDR (which may take anywhere from 3 to 20 shutter clicks to produce 1 final image), I do a lot of experimentation (still learning!), and I have an utter lack of patience (which means I'll start shooting anything that comes along, worthwhile or not).

Luckily for me, pixels are cheap. :D

[mattyb240]

This is quite interesting as I am currently going through my hard drive as we speak! I'm a beginner, and frankly I think I need to learn to really think about each photo before taking it. I have many shots in sequence on a varying position, I think I take so many incase of finding out that I wish I had stepped slightly to the right!

Well so far 5GB freed up....

[gjl711]

I've become much more selective recently because my library is growing huge. About 25% get culled right off the bat, some for technical reasons, OOF, exposure and such and the others because I have multiple shots of the same framing and I just keep the top ones. Out of the remaining 75% I process maybe 10% of them to a JPEG, the rest stay RAW. of the 10% maybe 1/4 of them get processed for Flickr.

Some of the culling rules I use are:

If its a still life, bug, bird, wildlife it gets culled much more aggressively. I might come away with 20~30 shots of a particular bird and only keep 5~10 shots.
If it's a shot of family it gets culled much less aggressively. If the photo is reasonably sharp and salvageable, I'll keep it. I have developed this attitude from scanning all my old photos. I've noticed that the only ones of interest are the ones with people in them. Places, especially vacation type places hold almost no interest. Pictures of our old house and such are more interesting but it's the family that holds the greatest interest.
Pictures of places especially cityscapes, landscapes, and general stuff get culled really aggressively sometimes only keeping one shot or maybe even none unless there is something of interest or i really like the shot.

[auswy]

I keep all my photos on my HDD starting from my first Sony DSC-P10 point-and-shoot in 2003. File size wasn't much of an issue initially as pictures were only about 1MB each but then I started upgrading cameras. First it was to the Panasonic DMC-FZ18 which brought file sizes up to about 2–4MB—still not much of an issue. Then it was the Canon EOS 1000D where I started shooting RAW. ~10MB file sizes meant that I upgraded my photo storage HDD to 500GB and was good to go. Now that I've upgraded to the Canon EOS 500D, RAWs are 20MB+ each, videos are like 40mbps and my disk space is flying away! Might have to start being more selective about keepers and/or add another 1TB HDD to my system and/or start culling existing photos soon :P. I have over 100,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue at present.

[chauncey]

Viewing images at 100% is first cut.

[darosk]

I'm reaching about halfway on my 2nd external harddrive. Previously I thought, "BACKUP EVERYTHING! Don't lose ANYTHING!"

Now I cull all the obvious fails and duplicates. I still keep an awful lot though - and it's not 'cause they're any good, heh.

[BradM]

As an example of what I keep, I went for a 3 day weekend of shooting wildlife in NE Oregon. Three different owl nests, two different wetlands, an eagle nest with chicks and a few other subjects were covered in the period.

I came home with about 500 images total, the number on my drives now: 37.

[SOK]

At this rate I am going to have hundreds of Gigs of pictures before too long, at which point the collection will become rather unwieldy, but I don't want to get rid of something I may regret later.

Ahhh, the million dollar dilemma for all of us.

I started out obsessively keeping everything (along with a back up copy, no less)...but back then I was shooting JPEG so it wasn't quite as HDD intensive.

A few months later I switched to RAW, which was the motivation to start being more discerning with what I kept.

Like many, I bin the shockers and duplicates first up, and then make a few more passes to thin the keepers.

[Jcas]

I haven't had my dslr for that long, but it is pleasing that i now don't dispose of as many pics as i did when i first started out.

[MatthewK]

I haven't had my dslr for that long, but it is pleasing that i now don't dispose of as many pics as i did when i first started out.

I keep what I like, and I keep what might sell. The rest I chuck.

I also don't shoot by the hundreds. I am an old guy that learned photography shooting film so I am more "careful" about when I trip the shutter. I think that if the number of pictures you are shooting is creating a problem for you, the first thing you should do is stop taking so many.

I think that a majority of my photos are from the "experimental" phase, when I was learning the very basics, comparing lenses, and at the same time trying to get photos of events and people. As I have gone on, I noticed that my keeper rate increased while my total # of shots decreased.

So, time to devise a method:


anything that I wouldn't put on Flickr or post here for all of your discerning eyes: DELETE
any photos of special events/parties/people/family: KEEP
any blurry, OOF, under/over exposed: DELETE
all the flower pictures that don't fit under #1: DELETEI took a lot of flower pictures, those need to go... I get a chance every year to shoot em!

[bsaber]

I just went through all my pictures from Jan. 08 to May 09. Freed up about 5GB on the hdds about 3GBs are from deleting and 2GBs from converting to JPEG.