To Keep or Not To Keep?

That is the question on my mind.

I am merciless when it comes to tossing out the images I don't like, or don't think are quite right. I have roughly 20GBs of images on my hard drive, but if I kept everything I shot it would be at least 100. What do you guys think about keeping every picture you shoot, or tossing out the duds?

I keep everything.
Disk is cheap, so are DVD backups.

I throw out anything that is way too blurry or if the exposure is really bad. I'm talking stuff that is hard to identify bad. Otherwise, I pretty much keep it all. I just went through some old photos from a couple of years ago and found 4 or 5 shots that I liked and didn't pick out the first time through. Tastes change.

Everything goes on disc (DVD) I only dump the flat out bad ones.

Like a few of the others said. I keep just about everything. Only the REALLY bad ones get deleted.

I had a photo of a waterfall that I didn't like. I never even processed it to try to make it something I liked. One day a guy at worked asked me for some photos to see if there was anything he could use as a catalog cover. I put just about every vertical format photo I had on a CD, including that waterfall shot, and gave it to him. A few months later, that waterfall was on the cover of a catalog. Just today I sold a card with a photo of that waterfall on it. Not the same photo, but one I didn't like just as much as the one that went on the cover of the catalog.

Had I deleted them because I didn't like them, I would be out a couple hundred dollars.

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Originally Posted by photophorous

I throw out anything that is way too blurry or if the exposure is really bad. I'm talking stuff that is hard to identify bad. Otherwise, I pretty much keep it all. I just went through some old photos from a couple of years ago and found 4 or 5 shots that I liked and didn't pick out the first time through. Tastes change.

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Yep, this pretty much sums it up for me. In fact I have everything on two external hard drives.

I keep everything! If I delete, it'll be in the field on a very bad shot. But as was mentioned external drives are cheap, burnable DVDs and CDs are even cheaper, as are the drives to create the discs.

RAW files are like negatives, you never get rid of 'em. Same with straight off the camera JPG files.

I've been planning on dumping a lot soon.
They're pics that never were any good or ones I just don't care about.

out of focus or horribly exposed goes. Along with drunken eyes. Other than that, I keep them, for the most part. Although I'm rethinking that...personal snaps are one thing, but work stuff I'm not sure I need to hang on to everything.

I keep it all. That's what the external drives are for.

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Originally Posted by almo

What do you guys think about keeping every picture you shoot, or tossing out the duds?

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I still think like a film shooter, and original digital files are like negatives. I edit what's on my hard drive, but all orginals are saved on disc.

There have been many many times over the years when I've taken a fresh look at older images, including what you might consider throwaways, and suddenly decided I liked them for one reason or another... :cool:

Up to now I have kept pretty well everything. However, although storage is cheap, time isn't, and it takes me an increasing amount of it to find things, no matter how carefully the folders have been labelled. And I know, hand on heart, that 75% of it will NEVER be used in any context.

For this reason, I am starting to be a little more disciminating. I still keep everything which is half decent, but I do now get rid of the obvious garbage - the out of focus, the experiments which just plain didn't work, etc. Sure there may be the occasional time when I will wish I'd kept something, but not often. It's basic housekeeping as I see it, and not unlike clearing out the paperbacks you KNOW you will never read again because they were so awful the first time :D

Cheers
Mike

On a side note, It is kind of nice to read that I am not the only one with
out of focus shots, over exposed, blurry, junk .. etc.... But I digress. :)

I get rid of the unsalvageable junk. The other 2% of shots get backed up. :D

Really though, I get rid of a bunch of files when I shoot - I tend to shoot plenty of the same shot to make sure I have it. It's hard to tell on an LCD monitor if you have it exactly as you want it, even if you do take the time to look while shooting. This hasn't caused me to ever think "I wish..." later. It saves a lot of time not having to look at the junk when trying to find a shot later, too. Disk space is cheap, but time isn't!

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Originally Posted by another view

I get rid of the unsalvageable junk. The other 2% of shots get backed up. :D

Really though, I get rid of a bunch of files when I shoot - I tend to shoot plenty of the same shot to make sure I have it. It's hard to tell on an LCD monitor if you have it exactly as you want it, even if you do take the time to look while shooting. This hasn't caused me to ever think "I wish..." later. It saves a lot of time not having to look at the junk when trying to find a shot later, too. Disk space is cheap, but time isn't!

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This is pretty much how I do things myself.

I have no problem tossing what I do not like. Although Hard drive space is cheap these days, organizing and filing things can still get quite complex and time consuming and so I try to limit what I have to images that I may actually use for one thing or another. If I shot the same subject at the same angle and comp but tried different aperture and exposures I will look through the set carefully and decide which worked as I wanted and the rest will go. Sure, it might be interesting to come across the set one day and see the differences in settings, but I do not wish to look through hundreds of images for a good one. I'm starting to have so many "keywords" that I may have to keep a book just for them . . .

I get rid of all images that have problems that are either irreparable or would require way to much time and effort to fix (particularly out of focus pictures). I do it for disk space, but mostly so I don't have to go looking through hundreds of junk pictures to find the good ones.

Well, you got me started......have probably deleted a couple hundred so far.

If it's OOF or horribly exposed, I have no problem tossing it. That's my first step in my workflow. If it's exposed correctly or exposed in a way that can be salvaged I keep it. I have found the same thing as others here, revisiting photos often reveals stuff I like later.

keep EVERYTHING. That's my opinion at least. I even keep the shots of grass that I use to get the exposure right. Memory's cheap. I've filled up a 200gb HD and getting near full on my 500gb, though it's not all photos.

This is the biggest ask in photography, ... "to keep or not to keep?"

It isn't up to us to know Almo.

Your State or National Library might find that what you think is your "junk," fills gaps in their archive. I've photographed several regional towns in Australia, not knowing (originally) that the National Library of Australia held not one image of the major regional towns that I photographed. The Library didn't request definitive artworks when I told them I had shots, they just wanted images ... "For 500 hundred years from now," someone said to me.

Several Forumites have written or implied, "dump the junk." I'm still trying to figure out what is junk.

I wonder if Gary Winogrand thought that what he photographed in the '50s was just junk or that Henri Jacques Latigue felt that he was just photographing throw-away images of his family playing ... and only important on the day or important just to show to his family?

There is a lot of work in your photographs Almo, no doubt ... look beyond this post.

You might like to look back at your images one day ... it doesn't have to be 500 years from now. I regret every image that I've thrown away ... thousands of them. Someone from the National Gallery of Australia said to me nearly a decade ago, "We would like your life's work." Well, the trash was carted away years ago. It is all too late to bank on land fill archaeoligists finding much in the future, there are mountains of fill sitting on top of the shots now.

I'm cursing my lack of judgement at the moment. When I was a student, I took many shots 'bracketting the exposures' on Kodachrome 35mm and Ektachrome (in formats upto large format). Images of the growth of my community that are no longer replacable and what am I exploring now? ... dynamic range exposure using Photoshop. A process that would have made the images unique.

Google 'dynamic range exposure' or 'hdr images' if you are not dabbling already ... and see what bracketed exposures can realize nowadays, that I didn't see above the last hint of shadow detail before D Max or the first perceivable detail after 0.1 above base (plus fog) in the highlights, densitometrically speaking.

My thinking yesterday is just that ... and not my thinking today. God only knows what I'll think about tomorrow photographically ... and I'm not even religious. I think that I've seen the light though.

Warren.