How many photos do you have and over how many years?

[TurtleCat]

Been thinking about this since the thread discussing storage and costs. For this I'm excluding smartphone pics because I treat those separately. I have a bit under 15000 camera images/videos (430GB) from 2002 to date. I'm a fairly aggressive editor and will delete most any image I don't like or has problems. And if I get new images of a subject or species I'll re-evaluate the older pics and any that don't stand up get deleted. I went on a big purge last year and deleted 10K images!

Of the 15K, over 10% are family images as well. I'm curious if I'm more typical of people here on the forum or on the tangent edge...

 

[EricKlees]

Since I switched to shooting 100% wildlife full time in 2019 i had 3 D500's and for a short time a D850 till i got the Z9 exactly 2 years ago yesterday.

I sold my D500's with 69k, 24k and 14k shots, the D850 with 11k and my Z9 has 253k.

My Lightroom catalogs, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 have a total of 48k images. The rest were culled and i still cull today as I get more and more selective. Depending on the day, i can cull a 2,000 or 4,000 image days down to 50 shots or as much as 500 shots based on the action I'm capturing. I usually cull much of the redundant images in burst unless there is actions like Eagles fighting then I'll keep the sequence.

I shoot an average of 4 days a week so I'm out often.

 

[Steve]

Lightroom says I only have 621,000 since 2016.

Now, if only there were a keeper or two in there...

Oh, it's worth noting I generally don't delete anything since I sometimes need examples of "bad" images / mistakes for my educational efforts. That, and I'm lazy.

 

[PhotoLover]

Since I switched to shooting 100% wildlife full time in 2019 i had 3 D500's and for a short time a D850 till i got the Z9 exactly 2 years ago yesterday.

I sold my D500's with 69k, 24k and 14k shots, the D850 with 11k and my Z9 has 253k.

My Lightroom catalogs, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 have a total of 48k images. The rest were culled and i still cull today as I get more and more selective. Depending on the day, i can cull a 2,000 or 4,000 image days down to 50 shots or as much as 500 shots based on the action I'm capturing.

I shoot an average of 4 days a week so I'm out often.

You are a lot better at culling than I am.

I aspire to your efficiency ....

 

[PhotoLover]

Lightroom says I only have 621,000 since 2016.

Now, if only there were a keeper or two in there...

Oh, it's worth noting I generally don't delete anything since I sometimes need examples of "bad" images / mistakes for my educational efforts. That, and I'm lazy.

You should create a "bad image"smart collection based on key words (e.g. "this sucked")

But I've also sometimes wanted to show people "bad shots." I was trying to explain to somebody how much better the light really is at certain times of day and had to go searching for poor light shots that weren't so bad I had deleted them.

 

[EricKlees]

You are a lot better at culling than I am.

I aspire to your efficiency ....

A couple things make it easier. I live 30-50 minutes of very very active Bald Eagle locations so i get a lot of shots if them. It's easy to be very selective and i look at it like this. I'm culling A LOT of very Sharp images so it's not about looking for sharp images and by deleting them, it gives me more reason/morivation to get it and shoot more eagles. I shoot a lot more than eagles but I have a lot of opportunity with them.

Another is at 20fps, i get a lot of similar images in a burst, so after you ID what you want in s burst, it's easy to just get rid of the rest. Many are redundant.

 

[TurtleCat]

Yeah, fast burst rates are making it more difficult to figure out what to keep among 20 nearly identical pics, lol.

 

[Steve]

Yeah, fast burst rates are making it more difficult to figure out what to keep among 20 nearly identical pics, lol.

Biggest trick is learning what perfectly sharp looks like for a given lens. Once you know that, if you have 20 or 30 identical ones, you can just pop through them until you see one that's perfectly sharp and flag it - knowing the rest aren't going to be any better. Saves a lot of time (especially when the first of second shot hit the mark )

 

[Butlerkid]

Guess it depends on how and what you count. I occasionally check two metrics for my shooting. (BTW - my shooting includes not only wildlife, but architecture, underwater, travel and a bit of IR and landscapesl.)

One - What percentage of the wildlife shots I take are real keepers...... For wildlife, I'm usually about 1-2% considering bursts of BIF's, etc. I am a ruthless culler! LOL!

Two - Over the years, how many images have I created that I'm willing to display on my website. My website contains about 5,140 images covering 1990 - 2023. That averages about 156 keepers per year over the 33 year period. BUT - I was working a very stressful job about 40-50 hrs/wk for 15 of those 33 years. So not much shooting then.

Geographically.....

USA - 48% Mostly architecture and landscapes, about 8% wildlife
Africa - 14% Wildlife
Canada - 8% wildlife and landscapes
Costa Rica - 6% Wildlife
Europe - 10% no wildlife
Asia - 10% no wildlife

 

[Viathelens]

Over 180,000 images over the last 12 years, none are family or any other kind of image than an attempt at serious photography. I do cull the obviously bad ones, but don't want to spend hours deciding which of the "good" ones to keep (and most are just a little bit different in pose) so simply keep a lot of them. I try to get out and shoot often. I have processed about 19,500 images over the years. One catalog. Images kept in folder by year and place where I shot. Right now it's all on JBOD (just a bunch of disks) but searching for a new, larger external drive to transfer the JBOD system onto that will be set up for RAID 1. As Steve said, sometimes I need "less than" shots for examples and I have those!

 

[Woody Meristem]

I have well in excess of 30,000 plus an untold number of slides from the film days. I cull daily since I probably average 100 images a day, keeping between 2% and 5% of the images on the card. Other than family photos, I only keep ones I think I may use again or that show something really unusual like a chipmunk eating a newborn rabbit. It's a terrible photo, but something I don't ever expect to see again. I've become more selective and ruthless recently and have dumped a lot of my older photos if I don't think more editing would make them keepers.

 

[jhallettbc]

According to LR Classic I have about 40,000 photos since I switched to digital in 2003 so that averages about 4000 a year. I think I'm pretty good at culling but when I go through my old photos, I can see that I am not. I keep them all in one catalog on my iMac so I can quickly use the metadata search to find almost anything. It is interesting to see the lenses I've had over the years--some of which I've forgotten about. I think rather than ever keeping a second catalogue on a HD, I'll just get ruthless in deleting to free up more space on my computer.

 

[StarTracker50]

Only pictures I want to process make it into Lightroom. Since I went digital there are 22,860 according to Lightroom. Keeping in mind that I didn't start shooting multiples till I got my Z8. That's not counting an uncountable thousands of slides and prints. So far, I've scanned less than 50 slides. I do cull mercilessly. If it's not sharp, it's history. Especially related to wildlife or insect photography, if the eye(s) is not sharp its gone.

 

[LouiseDan]

LRC says 53,000, from 2003 - to present, probably about 60% wildlife. I run one catalog so it does have some random stuff in it but it is mostly nature photographs. There are 10,000+ that are not in the catalog that are scanned old family pictures and images sent to me by family.

 

[Zep33]

I retired my D850 after about 4 years in September with 241,000 on the odometer. Before that was a D7200 and a P900. Don't remember what were on those but I wouldn't doubt if I was close to a million overall . LOL

 

[dorthzyx]

I have kept over 26,000 over the last 12 years. I am just reaching the stage where I can go back through them and cull bad and similar pics without my stomach turning over.

 

[GRey]

I have 98,000 back to 1980. I have 3,000 film scans from 1980 to 2007, the rest from D200 and D850 with iPhone, etc., mixed in. I have everything in one catalog to keep it simple. I cull about 50-75%.

 

[Anjin San]

110,000 since about 2012 but I only toss out of focus, black, inadvertent ground or clipped animal shots…drive space is cheap. But…I expect to get 20K at least in April in Tanzania with Steve…so might delete a few more than normal when I get back…but mostly I am drive space is cheap inclined. O& its a subject I’ve got a lot of and I’m shooting 20FPS bursts, I’ve started to delete some of the almost identical shots depending on how many I have to go through after an outing…but I’m also lazy like Steve said.

 

[TurtleCat]

Looks like I’m on the low side overall. I don’t at least have to maintain misses or other shots for education since I’m not a professional, a workshop leader, or someone presenting to others. That removes a lot of possible files sitting around.

 

[RichF]

Over 700,000 images since 2005 (which I switched from film to digital) because I get distracted too easily and don't sort. Starting to sort more recently.

Most are nature, both wildlife and some scenics or macro, a few people but not many Hope to cull this down to around 100,000 eventually before I run out of disk space and need to buy even larger disks

 

[RichF]

Biggest trick is learning what perfectly sharp looks like for a given lens. Once you know that, if you have 20 or 30 identical ones, you can just pop through them until you see one that's perfectly sharp and flag it - knowing the rest aren't going to be any better. Saves a lot of time (especially when the first of second shot hit the mark )

there is always the challenge deciding between the sharpest one and the one with the best composition/pose (head turned just right, ears facing forward, ...)

 

[jeffnles1]

Right now, a little over 29,300 in my main library. I just culled about 3,000 in my annual January purge. These are ones I have decided to keep. Some are true "keepers" or portfolio photos but many are images that bring back a special memory. It may be "superstitious" or just silly but I won't delete any images of family or close friends, everything else has to survive the delete key.

When I sold my D500 last year, I had almost 100,000 clicks. I've had my R7 for 11 months and am around 30K image.

Jeff
edit to add [ my library dates back to 2007. I have thousands of Kodachrome slides in boxes dating back to 1978).

 

[KurtH]

88,770 since 1998. Includes some scanned pics from the film days as well as some old family photos. I will probably cut that in half when I start going through some of the older folders...and even that seems too high.

 

[KurtH]

Over 700,000 images since 2005 (which I switched from film to digital) because I get distracted too easily and don't sort. Starting to sort more recently.

Most are nature, both wildlife and some scenics or macro, a few people but not many Hope to cull this down to around 100,000 eventually before I run out of disk space and need to buy even larger disks

Hi Rich, that's a lot of photos! Losing 600k is going to be some work, probably cheaper just to buy another disk and call it a day

 

[BlackRockArt]

This is a good topic.

I did a quick check, over 20 years, excluding films, I took only 730K photos, 30% of these were taken between the year 2019 ~ 2022. My subjects include landscape, wildlife, birds, nature, portraits, weddings & engagements, and funerals. This number is far below my estimate, towards the 2nd half of 2022, I really slowed down even with upgraded gears.

The wildlife and bird photos bring me the most joy, while other genres pay the bill.

Oliver