Deleting Duds

[jcuknz]

I was brought up in the 'film' age and impressed with the irreplacable negative. The result is that unless I have been extremely careless or really stupid in operating the camera I almost never delete a file .... good bad and indifferent are all saved in my archive folders under camera number. You never know!

[stelin]

I have the same problem although I am now starting to delete some old near duplicates of stuff that I really don't need. (It still gives me the shakes though!!)

[Kris V]

After years of hoarding every picture I took, I'm now absolutely ruthless - Before I transfer my card to the computer, I look at every picture in Bridge and delete what I don't like.
Exception made for family snapshots - Those are keepsakes - even the badly composed ones!

[Tringa]

I don't see a problem with your method, jcuknz. Hard drive storage it is not as cheap as it was a few years ago but it is still not expensive, so if you want to keep everything, then why not?

I transfer every photo to one of my internal drives. I then have quick look and delete the rubbish. Then I spend a fair bit of time trying to whittle the remaining ones down. However, looking at the ones I have kept, I'm not sure I am as rigorous as I should be.

Dave

PS Some time later, and I'm a bit ashamed of admitting this, I get around to backing up the photos to an external drive.

[Glenn NK]

I was going to be ruthless - my first hard drive on my photo machine was 97 percent full. Tried to do some stacking a couple of weeks ago, and the machine started to hang up - not enough space to work in.

Started to delete some duplicates and some JPEGs (I only shoot RAW, so these are expendable and can be replaced), and it's still 97 percent full.

Yesterday I added a 2 TB HDD for photos - in time I will run out of space again.


The hard question to answer is, "what's a dud"? Today I revisited some images taken two years ago - images I almost erased - discovered that they weren't so bad after all (one of the major changes in LR4 enabled this).


I'm starting to think like the OP - don't discard anything (wish he had a first name). Like him, my background is with film (44 years).

Glenn

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi all, Personally although i have heaps of spare storage, if im "playing" ill delete all photos after ive processed and sorted out the keepers. If im out on a serious mission then i keep everything excepting duplicates. i never keep Jpegs, why bother i can make more..... and i keep all of my "snaps" of family, friends ect. LR makes it sooo easy to catalouge and browse, there is no need to go mad with deleting stuff.

Glenn, it not likely that your HDD being full would cause your pc to hang, unless it was totally full to the brim! more like to be not enough RAM or your processor not being up to the task stacking can be pretty intensive!

[stuck]

I too keep everything, HDD space is cheap and you just never know...

Ken
PS I am also daft enough to keep the boxes to everything I buy. If nothing else they act as insulation in the roof space of my garage

[drjuice]

I agree with the "keep everything" philosophy. Anybody who's a teacher has learned you ALWAYS need bad examples, regardless of the discipline in which you teach! ;~) And, while we may not be proud of them, at least we have the rights to them.

The only thing I ever get rid of is accidental exposures and images I use to make sure everything is working after I've gotten a camera back from repair or after I've put everything back together after cleaning.

virginia

[rpcrowe]

I have plenty of computer storage space but, I cull down my images to a workable.

[jcuknz]

I was influenced by Larry Bolch who apparently had/has three linked computers with a programme which saved each file onto all three.... I so far only have two HDs with one computer, ignoring my notebook for travelling.

[CMP]

I, personally, store all my photographs on an external HDD but I delete the photographs that aren't sharp/are badly composed etc first before I transfer them over. That way I only have my best ones.

[gregj1763]

I load a days photos into iPhoto then delete the duds from there. Before ejecting the sd card I backup all the raw images to an external hard drive and have just purchased 50 GB of storage on Amazon iCloud where I am making a backup of all my raw data, currently 29 GB.
Cheers, Greg