What do you do with duplicate pictures?

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EricKlees said:
To not have to search through thousands and thousands of unedited images to find one you might want to edit, look through a certain sequence to edit a few from it.

For some of may be space issues, but in general most have plenty of space
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I'm a newcomer to Lightroom, but I understand its filing system makes finding the images you want very easy. Prior to getting it, I would save the images I wanted in a separate folder, usually on my computer's internal HD while the rest went to external HDs.
 
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I delete, but not aggressively enough. One of the problems I find now is that there are so many pics I won't make the effort to go through them. I see the same thing in my Google Photos account. Too many can be just as bad as too few.
 
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I'm still a 'future wildlife photographer' so when I fill my cards with A LOT of images it's often of kids playing sports. (btw very good practice for when I become an actual wildlife photographer). With the advanced autofocus systems from the current crop of state of the art cameras coupled with all of the excellent instruction we get through this forum and Steve's books and videos, the number of potential keepers quickly becomes staggeringly high when shooting at 10+ fps. I could not imagine reading them all onto a drive much less keeping all of them. Nevertheless I always struggle with tying to reduce the number down. I start by not reading all of the images into Lightroom. Anything out of focus or not of good composition never makes it off the card. Next I do tonal edits in batches and view on a large monitor. I try to quickly set reject flags for any that are redundant or not as good relative to others. Those flagged as rejected get moved to a separate folder I call outtakes. I save them for a little while but eventually delete the outtakes. I prefer not to have an overwhelming amount of photos saved. While I certainly wouldn't trade away my amazing cameras, I sometimes lament the film days when photos were taken with more care and thought. I might need to seek therapy. Even when I take someone's portrait I end up spending a crazy amount of time trying to distinguish fine differences between more then 100 images that are all pretty good! :ROFLMAO:
 
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RikWriter said:
Huh. I'm able to fit every single RAW image I've ever taken in Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Alaska in the last 18 years onto two $230 Samsung 4TB SSD external HDs. Not seeing a downside to keeping them.
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OK, now that you have kept them. What are you going to do with them?
 
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mdirvin said:
OK, now that you have kept them. What are you going to do with them?
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Funny you should ask. Since I just broke down and bought the Lightroom/Photoshop suite via subscription, I've been going back through past photo trips and seeing if there are any images I should have given a second look. On my May 2020 trip to Yellowstone, I got the Wapiti Lake wolf pack for a whole day on a kill in the Hayden and took about 3-4,000 photos of them. I initially only post-processed a hundred or so because my old workflow was so labor-intensive. Going through them again, I added another hundred.

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RikWriter said:
Oh, I'm not trying to convince you to do it my way, believe me. To each their own. I was more trying to understand the reasons behind getting rid of them.
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Maybe that's it. It's not about getting rid of them per se. They just aren't needed even there is almost no difference from most of the images in a burst. Take the tea you like and cull the rest. Most people see no need to keep 40 of virtually the same image
 
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On my first review, I delete all images not in focus and ones with bad backgrounds, clipped wings, etc. On the second pass, I star rate them with the intent to locate the best images. At this stage I do not delete the "second best " mages as some of these might become "best" given some time away from them. I usually rate the best with five stars and the next best with four stars. Other good images get three stars. The rest are deleted. My final ratings and cuts are done anywhere from two months later or at the end of the year. I do keep some images that are good for teaching purposes too.
 
One cool thing about lightroom is the automatic stacking feature. In one of the menus at the top.. You set a time interval, say 3 seconds, and every shot taken within 3 seconds of each other is grouped into a single stack. Keeps the clutter down and the organization up.
 
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RikWriter said:
I'm a newcomer to Lightroom, but I understand its filing system makes finding the images you want very easy...
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True assuming you do the work up front with file naming/keywords, etc. It still takes a lot of work and you need a filing/naming/tagging system. Also the LR catalog itself can get pretty large when you have tens of thousands of images in one catalog.

Then one day you look for a particular image that you KNOW is in there but can't find it in LR. And you shot 10,000 images on that trip. But somewhere along the way you goofed something up and now can't find it in your catalog. But you didn't get rid of anything. So now you've got 10,000 images to search through to find that one you're looking for :confused:
 
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I keep the 1st and 2nd cut RAW files for about a week and delete anything that doesn't make the 1st cut the same day. I keep the final (3rd) cut edited JPEGs and the corresponding RAW files forever in case I want to re-edit for a competition, calendar, etc. The only exception to this is if I've been on a big trip in which case I would keep the 1st and 2nd cut RAW files for longer to make sure that I hadn't missed anything.
 
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bleirer said:
One cool thing about lightroom is the automatic stacking feature. In one of the menus at the top.. You set a time interval, say 3 seconds, and every shot taken within 3 seconds of each other is grouped into a single stack. Keeps the clutter down and the organization up.
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Thanks for posting this. I wasn't aware of this very cool feature. I've essentially been doing this manually. This can be a huge time saver.
 
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mdirvin said:
OK, now that you have kept them. What are you going to do with them?
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I’m not Rik…but I don’t delete either…and my answer to your question is *nothing*. I’ve got the space and it takes time to go through the unused images and decide whether to keep or trash each one…and that time is better spent on numerous things. Deleting out of focus, clipped, or bad poses gets done on the initial cull…and potential keepers get 1 starred or flagged. Starred/flagged get culled again with a filter to pick the best pose or whatever of the 3 or 4 possibilities until I get down to the number I want for the blog…then those get PP, export, and blogged. The initial cull rejects get deleted and the remainder just occupy drive space and keeping them while doing nothing is a zero time option. Of course…just deleting them all blindly is also a zero time option…but the other day I took 1300 frames at DeSoto and ended up with 20ish for the blog since I had a couple of hunting sequences and ospreys disagreeing sequences. Blindly trashing the 1200something I didn’t PP seems foolhardy to me without another look…and looks require time.

But there isn’t any wrong answer here…we do what works for each of us. I admit freely that the 10,000 or so shots from our trip to Alaska, BC, and the Yukon that didn’t make the blog will likely never be used…but theyre in a folder that never gets looked at accidentally…and while that trip was in 2015 in our full time RV days I did go back late last year to reprocess some of the brown bear closeups with new and better software we have now for noise, sharpness, LR features and AI upscaling…and then they went on the blog as blasts from the past…but unless I deliberately go back those shots are out of sight, out of mind. I suppose I could export them to a new catalog named Archive 2010-2018 or something then delete from the main catalog…but why? Takes time and with only 125K or so images in the catalog what’s to be gained? Nothing IMO.
 
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I’ve been into photography since the early 70’s with film and since 2000 with digital. In the beginning I kept everything but as I have matured and today’s cameras offering 20 and 30 fps, it’s way too easy to go home with a few thousand images from a morning shoot. You can save them all if you have a big budget for hard drive space or bite the bullet and start deleting duplicate images. Obviously, I check each one, and when I find 3, 4, 5 or more in a row that are virtually the same shot, it’s time to hit the trash bin.
 
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I aggressively delete once at my computer. The camera screen is too small to be able to tell how good a shot is. Only keep the "best", and maybe keep a few sequences. I generally keep <10% of my shots...maybe only 2%. I find the "value" of what I end up keeping is significantly greater since I don't have to wade through lots of poor images, and can quickly find the best ones!
 
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DougC said:
I’ve been into photography since the early 70’s with film and since 2000 with digital. In the beginning I kept everything but as I have matured and today’s cameras offering 20 and 30 fps, it’s way too easy to go home with a few thousand images from a morning shoot. You can save them all if you have a big budget for hard drive space or bite the bullet and start deleting duplicate images. Obviously, I check each one, and when I find 3, 4, 5 or more in a row that are virtually the same shot, it’s time to hit the trash bin.
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You don't need a big budget BTW. $230 for a 4TB SSD portable Samsung HD that's about 3 inches long, 2 inches wide and half an inch thick. I keep all my portables in a small tupperware container on a shelf of my computer desk. I also label them with sticky notes.
 
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RikWriter said:
You don't need a big budget BTW. $230 for a 4TB SSD portable Samsung HD that's about 3 inches long, 2 inches wide and half an inch thick...
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Isn't it crazy that we even talk about such volumes these days? Remember floppy disks? What did they hold 1.5MB or something such? I recall when my company upgraded the hard drives on all our PCs to 40MB and we all grumbled how unnecessary it was :rolleyes:
 
NorthernFocus said:
Isn't it crazy that we even talk about such volumes these days? Remember floppy disks? What did they hold 1.5MB or something such? I recall when my company upgraded the hard drives on all our PCs to 40MB and we all grumbled how unnecessary it was :rolleyes:
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I'm old enough to have used cassette recorders. The first 5ish inch floppies were miracles.
 
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Via Fast Raw Viewer I immediately delete any photos lacking focus, etc. Then in Lightroom classic I rate them with 1, 2 or 3 stars. 1 star gets deleted immediately and there may be some duplicates there. Then I work on the 3 star photos and if I'm satisfied with the result I give it 4 stars. I usually then delete the 2 star images, which were kept in the event that I made a mistake and the selected 3 star image is no good, then I try to find a better image in the 2 star images. I may even then delete the 3 star images.
 
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