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

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!

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.

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.

Hyun wrote in post #5755355
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.

Hyun wrote in post #5755355
...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.

BearLeeAlive wrote in post #5756821
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.

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.

Eagle wrote in post #5756119
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.

Karl C wrote in post #5758095
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

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!

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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".