What photos should I keep?

This used to be a no brainer. All of them! That's when a 4GB card could hold over 300 photos. Now that I've been shooting with a D750, my server space has really been getting ate up. At a little over 500 photos on a 32GB card, you can easily see how this happens.

Also, I've been shooting more events and weddings, so going from maybe 50 photos on a shoot to 200-400 depending on the event and the length of said event, I'm also ending up with more photos.

Generally my work flow consist of copying all the photos over and the doing the initial culling then editing and delivering the finished product. At what point do you delete photos and which photos do you delete? Everything that's not used? How about the original RAW files? I export all mine delivered photos to original sized JPEGs for printing and small web photos for customers to share. I may never go back and touch a RAW photo ever again but would it be wise to delete it and end up with only the JPG to edit?

Just trying to get some opinions and ideas here as this weekend I started thinking about my waning server space. I am going to buy several larger drives and migrate, but then I also have to worry about backing up my collection and what not.

Village_Idiot wrote in post #17810098
This used to be a no brainer. All of them! That's when a 4GB card could hold over 300 photos. Now that I've been shooting with a D750, my server space has really been getting ate up. At a little over 500 photos on a 32GB card, you can easily see how this happens.

Also, I've been shooting more events and weddings, so going from maybe 50 photos on a shoot to 200-400 depending on the event and the length of said event, I'm also ending up with more photos.

Generally my work flow consist of copying all the photos over and the doing the initial culling then editing and delivering the finished product. At what point do you delete photos and which photos do you delete? Everything that's not used? How about the original RAW files? I export all mine delivered photos to original sized JPEGs for printing and small web photos for customers to share. I may never go back and touch a RAW photo ever again but would it be wise to delete it and end up with only the JPG to edit?

Just trying to get some opinions and ideas here as this weekend I started thinking about my waning server space. I am going to buy several larger drives and migrate, but then I also have to worry about backing up my collection and what not.

Two schools of thought here:
1) Storage is cheap, so keep everything
2) Only keep the stuff that's worth keeping

I personally fall under #2. I cull and delete mercilessly.

I permanently keep the RAWs of the following:
- The finals that I've delivered to the client
- If I've made any composites (head-swaps, etc) I'll keep the originals that contributed to the final image
- A handful of shots that I liked as alternates, but didn't deliver to the client
---- for instance, if I'm delivering five images, maybe there are eight that I liked, so I'll retouch and deliver five but keep the other three for myself without spending the time to retouch
- A handful of out-takes

I do some culling in camera, if I have time during the shoot (kinda rarely). I do most of my culling in Lightroom, often after applying a batch edit to the set.

Some people will say "Well, maybe your editing skills will get better, and you'll want to go back and do new edits to old pictures, so even if you don't like them now, maybe you'll like them in the future." My response to that, is that I'm always shooting more stuff - I have no shortage of new photos to edit, and my lighting/posing/compos​ition skills are also improving - so there's usually little reason to go back and edit old things. If anything, I'll go back and re-edit my favorites from the past; there's no sense in re-editing the mediocre ones from the past. Delete 'em.

My keeper rate is generally around 20%, sometimes it's around 5% if I'm doing experimental things, sometimes it's close to 50% if I'm shooting something easy.

I used to keep everything as well, but I have changed up my work flow a bit. I know do my initial culling for blinks, miss fires, you know the technical garbage. Those get deleted right away. Next I rate the rest 3 stars are going to be deliverable and 2 stars are technically good but not the best of the batch, those get saved for a bit in case I need one for a head swap or something. After I am done editing my 3 star images and deliver them to the client I wait about 6 weeks, if there is no "do you have another of this pose, or did you get one with so and so" I delete the 2 star images leaving me only the delivered files in JPG and RAW. I have yet to feel the need to delete either version of my final delivered images. That is unless its for a boudoir client in which case I delete all images 3 months after delivery (unless I have written permission to use the images for my portfolio).

I used to be a 'keep everything' kind of guy as i have / had plenty of storage but being that my PC case only supports 5 HDDs i've now run out of physical space so having a cull...
I am clearing all the crappy blurry / oof ones i can't save and also duplicates.... well not technically duplicates but i used to shoot a lot of burst series so can easily get rid of about 5 or 6 per series. So far i have killed about 1500 shots this way and i'm only part way through!

The problem with keeping "everything" isn't necessarily storage, it's trudging through too many images when I'm looking for something. If I've got 1,000 images of male Costa's hummingbirds, going back at a later date to find one I want to use would be a lot easier if I had culled it down to the 50 best.

I've used an external HDD dock for a while, and it works pretty well. Granted, I probably need a NAS or something along those lines. I do like being able to hot swap drives from the dock (after ejecting them, of course) and many of the dual docks offer a single button "clone" to a second drive for backups. It's not the ideal solution, but it works and it's an affordable way to start. So as much as I try to cull my photos, I always tend to still keep quite a few.

I also have a system where I organize my photos in folders by year. That way, once my internal HDD gets too much stuff on it, I can simply make sure I've backed up those years to a third drive, and delete them from my internal drive. So, in essence, I have an internal drive that's always organized, a primary external for backing up the photos from the internal drive as I import the photos into Lightroom, and a secondary external drive that is a clone of the primary external and gets updated occasionally. It's currently stored in a fireproof/waterproof safe in my home, but I'm going to be adding an additional drive and moving that off-site for additional security.

Some good ideas and methods here. I switched to an HP micro server from an old HP MediaSmart with WHS. I'll be running 4 4tb drives with Stabilebit's drivepool for the main storage so I have that covered. And 16TB seems like a lot, but so did 2.75, but I ended up coming up against that limit quick.

See my wedding workflow. I keep all RAW images that are given to customers, I delete others a few months after the wedding - I keep around 1/4 of images I shoot at a wedding. While storage is cheap, storage for 1/4 of the stuff you shoot is cheaper than storage for all of the stuff you shoot.

I've gone back to RAW for a few files over the years. Not many, but software keeps improving, as does my eye, so it's handy for those portfolio shots. Plus if you do any trendy processing you can go back to the RAW to get the original image once the trend wears off.

Personally I take a middle ground approach. Keep everything of reasonable value.

I start and cull everything that came out as just plain junk from the get go. Then I sort through and rate images with 1-3 stars. Special or unique images get bumped to 4 or 5 stars. Stuff gets keyworded, and 3+ star images readily get shared, dipping into the 2s if I happen to be short on photos from an event, and falling back on the 1s if I need a photo of a specific person and have nothing better. At this time I'll also cull out effective dupes.

At the end of the year I go back and start sorting through old photos for a few hours, and begin culling again. Making sure I have photos of every team member and every event, but also cull out more effective dupes as I spot them, and try to update keywording with more precise content.

Going back to re-rate and cull more, being more aggressive with what passes as 'acceptable' keeps the total number of images in check, while still taking advantage of cheap storage.