Why do we keep cr@p photos?

bigeoino

I was just looking through the stats of my flickr photos and saw that I had a lot of photos with no views (by a lot I mean a shade over 22% of my photostream or >1700 photos).

Now a lot of these were added in the days when I used Flickr as an online back up and before I got a 400D which shot up the file size and meant I had to get some external harddrives for back ups (esp. for the RAW files).

But when you take into account the ones that have been viewed only once (another 800 or so), that's around 1/3 of all my online photos that have been viewed once or not at all. [Hint to find these numbers, you can edit the page number in the URL on the stats page... and then a quick calculation]

OK, even though about 2/5 of my photostream is only available to my 100 or so Friends and Family, it still would indicate that there's a lot of photos on there which have generated little or no interest.

But can I just delete them?
No, sorry, even though I know the number of unseen pixels is going to go up, storage costs are going to go down, and so, like gmail, I'll probably just leave them to gather digital dust...
Somehow I just can't bring myself to delete them. Apart from badly composed or blurred images that get deleted as soon as they get transferred to the PC, I just can't seem to delete them! Even when I bracket a photo, I'll struggle to delete the poor quality one.

Am I the only one afflicted?

rymus

bigeoino wrote: »

Am I the only one afflicted?

God no. Since moving completely to RAW, I've got gigs and gigs of crap left over from every shoot. When I shoot an event these days, I'll dump all the photos onto my hard drive and then process the keepers and deliver them to whoever...

Then what I normally promise myself I'll do is delete the crap, keep the keepers in RAW format, transfer them to the archive and burn a couple of DVD's as backup.

What I actually do is throw the entire folder onto the archive and dont bother burning any DVD's. Procrastination is the way to go!

I reckon once the wedding season in 2008 starts I'll have no choice but to implement the plan above. Delete everything that just isn't going to get processed no matter how desperate I get and backup & archive the rest. Storage might be cheap as chips but there's no point in packing it up with rubbish.

Rob_T

For anyone with Adobe Lightroom there are some great tutorials available to help you separate the chaff from the wheat.

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/?id=vid0291

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/?id=vid0289

Now I just need take my own advise, damn you procrastination!!!!

GristlyEnd

Apart from the few I delete when chimping, I have everyone photo stored on 3 seperate drives. They are organised which is a help but it's taking up a huge amount of space. One of these days...........

FreeAnd..

I have recently taken a greater interest in deleting the Raw's that will definitely never see the light of day as a jpeg or anything else. After filling two external hard drives (alebit one of them with mainly movies) its a pain to have to keep deleting stuff in order to fit new photos on. I really do have to get a few more drives to be honest...

Masada

I have loads of photos too but lately ive been filtering out the crap stuff, takes ages!!!,

giddyup

This is a philosophical question. If you're a photo delete-er you try to make money from photography and if you take a beautiful photo it's a bonus. If you're a photo keeper you try to take beautiful photos and if you can make some money with them it's a bonus.