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

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!