Save all your pictures or delete?

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

I guess I'm lazy.. I rarely delete any.

Richard

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

I save a lot of images that I may never touch but they must at least be reasonably exposed and in focus and even a reasonable image. I suppose it boils down to keeper rate and how much you shoot coupled with how much hard drive space you use.

Including backup copies I currently get through around 1TB a year but that increases year on year.

no right or wrong answer, just make sure you buy enough storage.

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

Yes, HD space is cheap but my time is worth much more - I don't want to spend time slogging through photos I'll never do anything with, nor would I want to backup those files.

I save almost all of them; I'll delete fuzzy images or ones that are so poorly exposed that I can't get anything out of them. I have plenty of storage on my NAS and I don't really take a lot of pictures (I'm up to 6121 on my D300, bought in 2008). I do, however, keyword all of them in Lightroom so my image storage is not just a massive pit.

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

I certainly don't save EVERY picture but I save most. I go back through my old photos every year. It's obviously an excellent way to see how I have progressed in my photography and my post processing. What is less obvious is that having improved I can now see that images I dismissed as bad/boring are actually very good when looked at through a more experienced eye. For example, black and white processing was something I didn't learn for two or three years after I started photography. Many of the images I dismissed as worthless when they were colour work really well in black and white. This in turn has fed back into my photography as I am better able to look at a scene/subject and work out if it will make a good b&w shot before I press the shutter.

Conversely, many of the images I saw as good/great back then I now see as quite ordinary.

Delete is your friend. I make it a point to reduce every shoot by at least 50% and then mark or group the 10% that I might ever show anyone else. I do not "spray and pray". Never use continuous modes and maybe 2-3 pictures of a particular subjects. Make myself reduce that to the one shoot that is the best.

I photograph carefully and sparingly, avoiding burst mode shots unless necessary. I keep most of my shots, hard drives are relatively inexpensive, organization software is powerful, and I rarely know at the time what image I'll need in the future.

In the early days of my digital photography, I only had a 10 GB drive and culled my shots rigorously, much to my later regret. I was living in California at the time, and I have hardly any shots remaining as a keepsake.

Mark B. said:

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

Yes, HD space is cheap but my time is worth much more - I don't want to spend time slogging through photos I'll never do anything with, nor would I want to backup those files.

Click to expand...

I agree with the time premise, but for a different reason. Its not worth my time to slog through photos and decide which ones are "unworthy", and selectively delete, I just keep them all. I'll do a little culling when transferring from SD card to computer, but after that, its not worth my time and effort.

I learned photography long before digital, so I'm not one of those spray and pray people who take thousands of pictures of their trip to Disneyland. That means I don't have a lot of pictures to cull in the first place.

I trash everything that isn't either a good photograph or useful for some other reason. Why in the world would you keep an image that isn't worth looking at?

If I keep 10 out of 100, I am doing extremely well.

Immediate deletion: any shots that are clearly worthless, either technically or by subject; the ones in a burst that miss the critical time.

Retain: subject that might have some memory value in future even if not a good picture; as well as the ones that escape immediate deletion.

I store my raws by date subdivided by subject. I store my processed shots by subject. After a series of shots I go through the initial cull as above, then process the ones that I want now (and file by subject). But the unprocessed ones just stay in the raw folders.

I'm much better at PP now than I used to be. Two days ago I looked in a raw folder from October 2006 for a specific picture; I noticed some unprocessed pictures - unprocessed because at the time I could make nothing of them. So I spent a few minutes dealing with them - almost 10 years after I took them.

The point is that 10 years ago I "knew" I'd never work on them but I was wrong.

--
---
Gerry
___________________________________________
First camera 1953, first Pentax 1985, first DSLR 2006
http://www.pbase.com/gerrywinterbourne
[email protected]

I'll go blind, waste days and likely accidentally erase valuable images if I pick and choose images to store.

Storage is dirt cheap. Erase the shots of your feet, missed focus or where the flash didn't fire and store the lot.

--
photojournalist
http://craighartley.zenfolio.com/

My Lightroom archives go back to 2001 and currently has over 12k images (about 365GB of mostly raw files). I used to be pretty lax about deleting and tagging images. A couple of years ago I decide that like dieting, the longer I let things go, the harder it was going to be to get things under control. So I started a concerted effort to go back and delete images I really had no reason to keep and properly keyword tag those that remained. I've probably deleted 60-70% of images that I used to keep. I shoot things like BIF, often in high speed burst (now with a Canon 1DX2), so culling is now a real necessity. But I'm retired, and photography is my main hobby, so I treat image management as part of that hobby. I should really get even more picky. Probably only 10% of what I've kept are either good images, or strong reminders of our travel.

Art

When I first load photos from a shoot, I immediately weed through and dump the bad shots, the blurry shots, the ones that came out poorly, and in the case of bird and wildlife shooting where there are a lot of burst sequences, I pick the best of the series and dump the rest.

Then after I've gone through and picked out which ones to put online, or to post-process, I may end up bypassing some shots that upon close look just didn't have anything that really made me want to work on it or upload it...so once that phase is done, I often go back and delete a few more.

The last phase is at the end of each year, I go back through comparing my final Processed keeper folder to my RAW/Original file folder...and if I haven't had a single look at the 30-40% of the shots in the original folder that never got processed, cropped, uploaded, etc...I delete most of those...those are my big culls where I may knock out an additional 50-80GB of photos that at the time I thought maybe I'd come back to, and then realized I hadn't ever missed them or given them a second look for a year or more. Anything I worked on, processed, cropped, posted, or shared, I keep those originals.

I used to save the entire RAW content of my SD's on one backup HDD then transfer it all on my work HDD, before any shorting or PP with one folder for RAW, one for JPG and one for small JPGs that had been published somewhere...

It makes it so difficult to track down the files that I simplified a bit, delete any out of focus or accident showing shoes or sky.

I'm quite happy now to find all pictures when looking back as some where not very nice but kept information of where or with whom I was.

Of course that is good for personal pictures, if I was professional photographer, it would be probably different depending on the contract I would for example not keep any pictures of some wedding past written conditions.

Not saving all. Not possible. Though I need to aim for quality not quantity. Walking around city taking hundreds of pics with bracketing or other adjustments makes for a thousand at a time often enough. Raw to Tiff in camera from 36mp Raw to over 70mp Tiff. With all my mp3 and some docs on it I am getting close to having 5 terrabytes on a 6tb hard drive. Of these only post on 500 pxa and Flickr about 3 of what is left after first cut.

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

I agree that there's no real right or wrong answer. Whatever works with your workflow but keep enough of an open mind if a different process might streamlines things or improve your process a bit

For me, if I'm chimping trying to get the lighting perfect, I'll delete those right out, but when I'm shooting I tend to just leave the images as-is. Keep in mind, I shoot RAW.

When i get back to a "base camp" (home, hotel room, etc) and download the images (and rename them to the overall shooting project and time/date shot sequence), I'll clear out any I deem unsalvageable or not worthy of keeping: a misfocus, the unideal brackets, shots in a machine-gunned sequence (action shots), etc. that are less than ideal for the composition for the idea of the shot. Depending on what I'm shooting, this could be either 2/3rds worthy of post work (usually a staged shot) to 1 in 10 worthy of post (BIF/action/brackets)

From there, I'll edit in post, and rank them based on the result. If the result is good enough as a snapshot/low res web image naturally they'll be ranked lower. A large-format print-worthy shot will be ranked the highest. A print-worthy shot that had to be cropped will be slightly less. etc. All of them are stored on a RAID array for immediate editing with about 2TB of local access space, and then mirrored onto my NAS.

As I learn a bit more post tricks, I'll go back and retry some stuff. Usually about once every 6 months or so, if I have nothing better to do I'll try and re-work an image ranked lower, enhance an image ranked higher, and then re-decide if I want to keep or cull. In general, higher ranking shots are kept, lower-ranked shots are tossed, and occasionally one moves up or down the ladder.

The only exception is a "sentimental" shot that involves something that a family member really likes, even if it's not a good technical shot and I'd usually toss it, I'll keep it.

Storage is cheap but time is not.

I delete anything that doesn't make me smile.

Devildogz0311 said:

Just curious if you all save every picture you take, or do you delete the ones you know you'll never touch? I'm going through my external hard drive with all my pictures, and wondering if I should keep all the pictures that I took, but know I will never edit them, or just trash them and save the ones that are edit worthy?

Click to expand...

Obviously it's a matter of personal preference.

Amazon is selling 5TB external drives for about $125. That's about 2.5¢ a Gigabyte.

I go overboard and keep three copies of my image archive. That means I need 150MB of storage for each 50MB raw file. That 150MB of storage costs me under 1/2¢.

I'd rather spend the money of storage than spend the time sorting through images to find ones to delete.

But that's just me.