do you delete some of your RAW files?

Have been shooting RAW only, just curious what the consensus is in terms of whether you keep all the RAW files or just the "worthy" ones. They take up heaps of room, and while storage is getting cheaper these days, I'm still learning photography and consequently take lots of photos with a low percentage of good shots. The other day I went out and came back with 1Gb of files. I'm deleting the rubbish, but wonder what the good photographers do.

I get rid of those that are not keepers. Without showing how "bad" I am, let's say I ditch quite a few.

But I still probably keep way too many; I suspect most of us do in the hopes that someday we'll "see something" in that crappy shot and with PP it will become a winner.

Whether one keeps everything or not, might just reveal a personality trait - there are people that are squirrels, diligently saving "nuts", and others that are more like birds (take nothing when migrating).

Heck yeah, I delete the ones that are utter crap.. if I've totally stuffed up an exposure and it's unsalvageable why keep it? Also, if I have a run of similar shots throughout the night and there's nothing much that differentiates them I'll delete all but the best one. No point in clogging up my hard drive with photos I'll never use...

Hehe wether or not I am a good photographer I will leave to other to judge.

Howver I have just started to cleanup in my photos from 2003 and to now. So far I have cleaned up in 2003 and gone through half of 2004. So far I have deleted about 8 GB out of 178 GB. I could probably have deleted more but I do keep some photos that might be a little out of focus but still show an interesting subject.

Like this one:

http://photo.klein-jensen.dk …=20070714_harri​shawk1.jpg

If I deleted ALL technically bad photos that would have been gone too.

I try to be pretty ruthless. I use lightroom and mark any images that are crap for deletion.

Periodically I purge those marked for deletion.

Also when I take a series of shots - different exposures / poses / angles etc ... and eventually decide on the best, I mark that with a pick flag or star rating. Eventually unpicked and un rated images are considered for deletion.

In Neil's world - only the fittest will survive .. Ha hA hA hA hA ( Laughs in a dramatic bond villanish way )

PS - the other reason for deleting is to keep the lightroom catalogue size down - eventually I will need to split the catalogue but right now I would like to get away with keeping everything in the one file for convenience.

Most of my stuff is weddings, so I keep the lot. I have employed a BIG external HD to accommodate them. After 12 months I burn to CD the jpegs that I give the B&G, then dump the lot. Funny watching your work disappearing into the never-never.

I have a rating system for my weddings:
1) Technical problem (oof, badly exposed)
2) Duplicate image or not needed
3) For customer
4) For album
5) For my portfolio

#1's a deleted as soon as i've looked at the batch. #2's are moved to another folder and kept in case someone blinked in one of the keepers. #3 and up are client proofs. #2's are deleted after the album's done, and if they're used at all to fix blinkers I make them 3's and keep them.

I used to keep them all. As time goes by, I am getting more ruthless. These days I tend to keep maybe 1 in 4. I reckon that digital photos are free to take, so if I'm keeping more than that then I'm not taking enough pictures

I'm only doing this for fun, however. If I was shooting a lot of weddings then I'd probably keep most of them.

Thanks for your comments, guys. I've been thinking of the RAW files as negatives, and back in film days I would never have thrown away film. I'm not shooting anything as important as someone else's wedding, just my own hobby, so I don't know what I am worried about.

I only keep the Raw images of the photos that I convert, EXCEPT for family shots, I keep all of them, even the bad ones.

I only delete those that are out of focus or not exposed correctly, bad meter read or some such.

Me, too. But be careful what you decide has to go: Why I love RAW - '53 Ford Sunliner

I delete the ones that I don't like, for whatever reason. I really don't let my wife see them, because she say keep it instead. I create a separate directory for RAW and TIFF files in each folder. I make copies of all my RAW files onto an external HDD and delete them from my laptop. I work with the TIFF's as best I can and go back and get the RAW if I need it. That saves room on my laptop.

I'm just a beginning user of Adobe Lightroom, but so far, I'm finding it quite handy to scroll through each import session, flagging the "Picks" and "Rejects."

I can then sort out only the rejects and go through again for a second opinion. If a shot is a "double reject" then it gets blown off the drive.

Mind you, I'm something of a photo Pack Rat and it's really hard for me to gas any image. I wish I'd been more ruthless over the last couple of years because I'm now having to come to grips with beating 20,000+ shots into submission before I can effectively import them to LR.

So yes, I do delete the real stinkers...

Good Luck!

I look at it this way, I can either spend dozens if not hundreds of hours sifting through and deleting pictures... or I can just work an extra few hours for the $90 to buy a 500 gig drive. I choose the latter and just keep all my pictures. I also don't just take 10,000 pics so that I can get a keeper and put it on my wall, for the most part they are snapshots...to be looked back on when I am 90 and I will be glad I didn't delete all the crappy ones because they let me know what I was doing and what and what was going on at that time in my life.