As I noted in the other reply…I’m going to try marking more for deletion but I think I will wait until I’m done processing the keepers before actually deleting the non keepers, just in case.
To keep not-so-great images, or delete? Am I a digital image hoarder or a sensible archivist?
- Thread starter rjselders
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I'm currently scanning old negatives and slides and finding important images (both to me and my archivist) that I would have tossed back in the day. Its a form of rephotographing and keeps me busy in a time of advancing age and reduced mobility. I've saved all the raw files from multiple cameras and if I live long enough will give them the same treatment. My hoarding tendencies have resulted in ~10 terabytes of photo and non-photo stuff much of which I will never view again but that's another story.
xxx
Active member
Why keep culls?
James C.
Active member
I, generally, cull any photos that are:
• out of focus (OOF),
• the subject is partially out of frame,
• subject is too small in frame to make out details and cropping won't help,
• I have multiple shots of the bird in the same pose and light (I will keep no more than two photos if I think that the photo has some potential for experimentation, or it's a rarely seen subject, and I want to ensure that I have at least one "emergency rescue copy).
Still, even after just five years of doing bird photography, I have over 35,000 photos on my hard drive.
• out of focus (OOF),
• the subject is partially out of frame,
• subject is too small in frame to make out details and cropping won't help,
• I have multiple shots of the bird in the same pose and light (I will keep no more than two photos if I think that the photo has some potential for experimentation, or it's a rarely seen subject, and I want to ensure that I have at least one "emergency rescue copy).
Still, even after just five years of doing bird photography, I have over 35,000 photos on my hard drive.
James,I, generally, cull any photos that are:
• out of focus (OOF),
• the subject is partially out of frame,
• subject is too small in frame to make out details and cropping won't help,
• I have multiple shots of the bird in the same pose and light (I will keep no more than two photos if I think that the photo has some potential for experimentation, or it's a rarely seen subject, and I want to ensure that I have at least one "emergency rescue copy).
Still, even after just five years of doing bird photography, I have over 35,000 photos on my hard drive.
I like your criteria. The "no more than two" of an image makes sense. Since I am a hobbyist, there is little reason to keep 10 of an image.
Bob
thats_wildlife
Well-known member
Hi, here my 50 cents:
I rember the analog time of 24x36 photography. I used slides (within glass). One cassette could hold 100 slides of these. I dedicated 1cassette to each of the genres, which were wildlife, macro, landscape, people, architecture and abstracts. If I liked a wildlife shot, I had to decide which of the 100 wildlife shots to drop to get place for the new one that I like better. So these were my top 100 (of wildlife) in this cassette. This was hard. But it kept me disciplined.
In todays digital times this is no longer necessary. But I still keep it very selective. I just had a look on my hard disk. For the birds, which is a quite popular species within wildlife, I keep 980 raw images for the last 15(!) years.
So I can be sure to have reasonable material for each genre.
This similar tru for my travel photograpy. I select the images I like most, make a slide show out of it, and delete the rest of it. I hate people showing me hunderds of pics from their last travel. My presentations have 10-30 mins in mp4. And my audience likes this much more.
Br
Mike (thats_wildlife)
I rember the analog time of 24x36 photography. I used slides (within glass). One cassette could hold 100 slides of these. I dedicated 1cassette to each of the genres, which were wildlife, macro, landscape, people, architecture and abstracts. If I liked a wildlife shot, I had to decide which of the 100 wildlife shots to drop to get place for the new one that I like better. So these were my top 100 (of wildlife) in this cassette. This was hard. But it kept me disciplined.
In todays digital times this is no longer necessary. But I still keep it very selective. I just had a look on my hard disk. For the birds, which is a quite popular species within wildlife, I keep 980 raw images for the last 15(!) years.
So I can be sure to have reasonable material for each genre.
This similar tru for my travel photograpy. I select the images I like most, make a slide show out of it, and delete the rest of it. I hate people showing me hunderds of pics from their last travel. My presentations have 10-30 mins in mp4. And my audience likes this much more.
Br
Mike (thats_wildlife)
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These days I am experimenting with reversing my process. I'm putting everything off the camera in a folder named temporary 2025 on my desktop. From there I try to pick the few winners to move and import into lightroom. The rest are left in temporary for a while as I have room on the hard drive, but eventually will be abandoned.
maxxus46
Well-known member
Sounds similar to my workflow with fastrawviewer, where each session has a "rejected" subfolder. Any images that do not pass usual inspection go directly to the rejected folder, leaving my select images in the base directory. After a month or so I will delete the rejected folder if I'm happy with my original selects ( this gives me some time, a safety net until the rejected folder is permanently deleted)
SerenityScenes
New member
I keep everything. I do digital manipulation and I'm constantly finding new processes to use. Last year I did some changes to an image I took back in 2006. The image has since sold 4 times. I have a 40TB raid drive.
There are many reasons to either keep or cull, and everyone can do as they please. I've kept too many of some shots, and all of others, but recently have been reviewing my wildlife shots and culling more of them. My shots of people rarely get culled, but the criteria for my doing so is a multitude of shots that are all relatively the same or shots that are just bad ones. I almost always end up with some duplicates.
How I select/should select culls really depends upon the subject, but is typically done in stages when I do. First to go are the obvious failures, such as out of focus, non-cooperative subject, or embarrassing/compromising shots. Afterwards, well often there isn't an afterwards. But if there is, it is done after I've tried to do something with the shot in Lightroom and it is obvious that the photo just doesn't have the technical merit down to warrant keeping. Finally, there is the subjective selection, which is the hardest of all, where the question of whether the shot is good enough to keep is asked and answered.
If you really want a wake up call for your photography, have an expert level photo judge review your images. Enter what you consider the best of them into judged competitions and pay attention to the scores.
How I select/should select culls really depends upon the subject, but is typically done in stages when I do. First to go are the obvious failures, such as out of focus, non-cooperative subject, or embarrassing/compromising shots. Afterwards, well often there isn't an afterwards. But if there is, it is done after I've tried to do something with the shot in Lightroom and it is obvious that the photo just doesn't have the technical merit down to warrant keeping. Finally, there is the subjective selection, which is the hardest of all, where the question of whether the shot is good enough to keep is asked and answered.
If you really want a wake up call for your photography, have an expert level photo judge review your images. Enter what you consider the best of them into judged competitions and pay attention to the scores.
Calson
Well-known member
What works best for me is to quickly review the images and the ones that do not quickly grab me I delete. The deletes might be workable in post but not worth considering in less it is the only image capture in a rare situation.
lwan
Well-known member
I throw away everything that I know for sure no AI-fueled software will be able to salvage decently, unless it's a rarity and I need proof of sighting.
ChuckLe
New member
I'm guilty of keeping more photo's than are needed.
I do the following after a photo shoot:
1. Download all of my raw photos into a created NEF folder
2. Do a quick culling of photo's using Nikon's NX Studio. This allows quick access to all of the Nikon information for
the photo's
3. Anything out of focus, multiple duplicates, or I just don't like, etc are deleted
4. Final processing is done in LRC and saved into a Finals folder for that particular shoot
In the end what I've found is the Finals folder has far fewer pictures then the raw NEF folder. I still have a reluctance to delete out more of the raw photo's.
I do the following after a photo shoot:
1. Download all of my raw photos into a created NEF folder
2. Do a quick culling of photo's using Nikon's NX Studio. This allows quick access to all of the Nikon information for
the photo's
3. Anything out of focus, multiple duplicates, or I just don't like, etc are deleted
4. Final processing is done in LRC and saved into a Finals folder for that particular shoot
In the end what I've found is the Finals folder has far fewer pictures then the raw NEF folder. I still have a reluctance to delete out more of the raw photo's.
Bill Ferris
Active member
Over the last 10 months, I've revised my approach to image archiving. It started with an upgrade from my 6-year-old D500 to a Z9, last May.
My long-established workflow had been to delete obviously unusable photos in the field, import everything to my Lightroom catalog, review the new photos to give my favorites a star rating, and move forward with processing from there.
With 100K+ photos in my catalog, my standard practice has been to keep photos from the current year on a local drive in my laptop. All prior years are stored on an external drive. Everything is backed up in the cloud via Backblaze.
I had been accumulating new photos at a rate of ten 20MB raw files per second since May 2018. After a couple of months of accumulating new photos at a rate of twenty 45MB raw files per second, I started noticing performance issues with my laptop. It was clear that I'd max out both internal drives (500GB SSD and 1TB HDD) by October or November, at the latest.
Something had to change.
The modified workflow I've adopted is unchanged until after a day's photos have been imported, reviewed and rated. Now, I use LrC's metadata sort tool to select and delete all unrated photos. Typically, this removes roughly 80% of the photos that had been imported.
The other slight adjustment I've made to my review process is to intentionally look for three good examples to rate & save among photos of a bird or animal in a particular pose or body position. If I've photographed five flybys on a given morning and made 100 to 200 exposures during each, there will probably be 4 or 5 body positions in each pass that I like. I'll save at least 3 images from each; more if it's a close flyby with interesting body & wing positions.
This ensures that, while I'm purging the vast majority of photos taken, I'm not missing any good compositions from a shoot. I don't need 10-20 versions of basically the same photo. Three will do. As I like to say, "All I need is one good photo."
Last November, I upgraded my 5-year-old laptop to a model that's more nimble performing AI tasks in LrC and has dual 1TB SSDs. I also went back through my archive and applied the new strategy for image storage. Fortunately, the fact I'd been diligently rating photos for about a decade made it relatively easy to identify and remove the cruft going back to 2015. I didn't do nearly as much photography during my first several years shooting digital in the 2000s. That left about a 5-year window of photos that required some time & TLC to sort and separate the wheat from the chaff. It took a few days to clean up the archive and reduce the size by about 40%.
Now, I've got plenty of local storage in the new laptop for a year's worth of photos. Also, my external hard drives are happy at less than 50% of capacity. This year or next, I'll probably take advantage of Black Friday deals to upgrade my external drive storage system.
But there's no rush
My long-established workflow had been to delete obviously unusable photos in the field, import everything to my Lightroom catalog, review the new photos to give my favorites a star rating, and move forward with processing from there.
With 100K+ photos in my catalog, my standard practice has been to keep photos from the current year on a local drive in my laptop. All prior years are stored on an external drive. Everything is backed up in the cloud via Backblaze.
I had been accumulating new photos at a rate of ten 20MB raw files per second since May 2018. After a couple of months of accumulating new photos at a rate of twenty 45MB raw files per second, I started noticing performance issues with my laptop. It was clear that I'd max out both internal drives (500GB SSD and 1TB HDD) by October or November, at the latest.
Something had to change.
The modified workflow I've adopted is unchanged until after a day's photos have been imported, reviewed and rated. Now, I use LrC's metadata sort tool to select and delete all unrated photos. Typically, this removes roughly 80% of the photos that had been imported.
The other slight adjustment I've made to my review process is to intentionally look for three good examples to rate & save among photos of a bird or animal in a particular pose or body position. If I've photographed five flybys on a given morning and made 100 to 200 exposures during each, there will probably be 4 or 5 body positions in each pass that I like. I'll save at least 3 images from each; more if it's a close flyby with interesting body & wing positions.
This ensures that, while I'm purging the vast majority of photos taken, I'm not missing any good compositions from a shoot. I don't need 10-20 versions of basically the same photo. Three will do. As I like to say, "All I need is one good photo."
Last November, I upgraded my 5-year-old laptop to a model that's more nimble performing AI tasks in LrC and has dual 1TB SSDs. I also went back through my archive and applied the new strategy for image storage. Fortunately, the fact I'd been diligently rating photos for about a decade made it relatively easy to identify and remove the cruft going back to 2015. I didn't do nearly as much photography during my first several years shooting digital in the 2000s. That left about a 5-year window of photos that required some time & TLC to sort and separate the wheat from the chaff. It took a few days to clean up the archive and reduce the size by about 40%.
Now, I've got plenty of local storage in the new laptop for a year's worth of photos. Also, my external hard drives are happy at less than 50% of capacity. This year or next, I'll probably take advantage of Black Friday deals to upgrade my external drive storage system.
But there's no rush
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viper699
Well-known member
It depends- out of focus deleted- unless it’s a memorable experience I had, like seeing a yellow squirrel monkey leap over 30 ft. It’s a series that’s not in focus, but I’ll keep it for the specific memory.
I have a “nice” out of focus image of a ton of parrots flying off a clay lick. The shutter speed was too slow! And it would have been an incredible shot with so many blue headed parrots among others in one frame. But I save it because it’s colorful, and a constant reminder to have proper shutter speed, what a disappointment that was, and what a gorgeous sky their colors made- damn! The largest and most colorful clay lick I’ve seen so far.
If I have 20 shots of the same X in same pose, all equal etc I keep one or two.
I have a “nice” out of focus image of a ton of parrots flying off a clay lick. The shutter speed was too slow! And it would have been an incredible shot with so many blue headed parrots among others in one frame. But I save it because it’s colorful, and a constant reminder to have proper shutter speed, what a disappointment that was, and what a gorgeous sky their colors made- damn! The largest and most colorful clay lick I’ve seen so far.
If I have 20 shots of the same X in same pose, all equal etc I keep one or two.
Anthony
Well-known member
I do a quick cull as part of the import process. After that, deleting the inferiors is too much trouble. I have more interesting things to do than tidying up my over specified hard drive.
While storage space may not be a problem database management can become an issue. As painful as it is to get rid of good images it can be even more painful to manage them.[
IainD
Well-known member
Me too, but I wish I didn't.
pouru
New member
I go for quality over quantity—if a photo's out of focus or poorly exposed, it’s gone. I keep a few near-misses if they capture something special. For duplicates, I keep the best and delete the rest. Storage is cheap, but a tidy archive is way more satisfying. So yeah, sensible archivist here
I'm taking a lot more photos with the latest cameras than I was with earlier models. I'm selective about using higher frame rates, but for high volume bird photography it's pretty common for me to have a few bursts with pre-release capture and with high frame rates. I average as much as 1000 frames per hour photographing flying shorebirds at prime locations or photographing flying wading birds at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. I used pre-release capture a few times at each location when I had a good subject and was waiting for a takeoff or good head position.
With volume like this I'm culling 80-90%. or more. If a photo is merely okay, its a discard. It needs to be good enough to share here, print, or be a key image in an article. Small flaws in head position, a small shadow across the face or breast, or a slight softness are enough to make it a discard. I also only photograph for a couple of hours starting at sunrise, then a couple of hours ending with sunset, because harsh light high overhead is enough to create an even higher discard rate. My thought process is that if the light is not perfect, I can come back with better lighting at another time.
With volume like this I'm culling 80-90%. or more. If a photo is merely okay, its a discard. It needs to be good enough to share here, print, or be a key image in an article. Small flaws in head position, a small shadow across the face or breast, or a slight softness are enough to make it a discard. I also only photograph for a couple of hours starting at sunrise, then a couple of hours ending with sunset, because harsh light high overhead is enough to create an even higher discard rate. My thought process is that if the light is not perfect, I can come back with better lighting at another time.
I keep what I consider useable, and even if it is another pin sharp duplicate, it's goes under the format.
Storage is cheap, I get that. But images I will never use is just a burden to sort thru.
Storage is cheap, I get that. But images I will never use is just a burden to sort thru.
Out of focus goes. Otherwise I keep what I like and like what I keep. Print what I really like. The rest are deleted. I understand that no one will ever care what's on my hard drives, or for the most part what I print, except me.
Thank you all for your advice and philosophy on image management.
Bob
Bob