Need Advice?

[Tom Pryor]

I have a question that I'm sure many of you have dealt with.

When you go out for the day and you shoot 200 or 300 images, what images do you keep and what do you trash? Also some images look the same so what do you do with those ones, as I'm starting to get a number of images and would like some advice.

[Dennis]

I have a question that I'm sure many of you have dealt with.

When you go out for the day and you shoot 200 or 300 images, what images do you keep and what do you trash? Also some images look the same so what do you do with those ones, as I'm starting to get a number of images and would like some advice.

Tom,

This is something that I think that we all go through with, and I have to say that it is hard to get rid of our images that we have taken but at the cost of filling up the hard drive or drives real quick.

The way I have mine setup is for the different kind of shooting, and I create folders for let`s say Landscape, Birds, Sunsets, Events and you need to decide on how you want to go from there. Let me use my nature stuff as an example, I have Birds in one folder and then a folder for each species of birds that I managed to capture. And in there I would have a mammals folder etc...

Now this is a very good question that you have asked here, and I`m still have a number of areas that I need to clean up and I`m sure tons of my images can be trashed since I kept-ed those images even if they are not perfect.

So here is what I do now after I have been out shooting.

I go through all my images, and the ones that I know are out of focus, and ones that I know I will not keep I flag them with (1) in Photo Mechanic. In this software you can use flags from 0 to 5 so in my case all the Zero flags are keepers and the 1 are for deletion. Now once I went through the images I will delete all the Flags with 1. The next process is go one more time through the images and check for lighting, composition, pose, sharpness. Now when I have more than 1 image with the same subject matter I will keep 2 minimum and delete the rest as there is no point keeping anymore than that.

I would suggest that you check your current images and remove the ones that you will no longer want before doing this process as it will mean that you have to go through even more images.

When I went through my images to weed out the dups and bad images, I found 6 thousand images that I have no idea why I kept them for over the years.

[Dennis]

One quick note: If you capture something that you have never seen before and it may not be the best image, I suggest keep that image until you can get a better photo. I do this for birds that I have captured and never seen before and try to ID it, and sometimes just having that image on the hard drive makes it a bit easier to ID.

[Wayne Brown]

Man so far I have saved all mine and never deleted any of the photos good thing I don't have many but good to know where to start.

[ncphotos]

Hi Tom,

Dennis has give you a good process for getting rid of the photos that you don't want to keep.
I also go threw all the photos take from the day and delete any that are blurry or no so good for what ever reason. I then process all the photos in photo shop crop, adjust levels ect. and then burn them to CD so I will have a backup in case the computer crashes. Then if needed you could delete some off your hard drive to free up space for more.

[Dennis]

Good point about the backup Chuck.

I don't trust CD's but that is me. I have a copy on the computer drive, one on my Drobo drives and one more copy on the Home Server. Once I go through the keepers, and move the images into there areas, a program called Mirror Folder will move the ones from the computer drives to the other 2 devices automatically for me.

But what ever works best, but a backup is a MUST. If not and you have a crash all those images are gone for good.

[Tom Pryor]

Tom,

This is something that I think that we all go through with, and I have to say that it is hard to get rid of our images that we have taken but at the cost of filling up the hard drive or drives real quick.

The way I have mine setup is for the different kind of shooting, and I create folders for let`s say Landscape, Birds, Sunsets, Events and you need to decide on how you want to go from there. Let me use my nature stuff as an example, I have Birds in one folder and then a folder for each species of birds that I managed to capture. And in there I would have a mammals folder etc...

Now this is a very good question that you have asked here, and I`m still have a number of areas that I need to clean up and I`m sure tons of my images can be trashed since I kept-ed those images even if they are not perfect.

So here is what I do now after I have been out shooting.

I go through all my images, and the ones that I know are out of focus, and ones that I know I will not keep I flag them with (1) in Photo Mechanic. In this software you can use flags from 0 to 5 so in my case all the Zero flags are keepers and the 1 are for deletion. Now once I went through the images I will delete all the Flags with 1. The next process is go one more time through the images and check for lighting, composition, pose, sharpness. Now when I have more than 1 image with the same subject matter I will keep 2 minimum and delete the rest as there is no point keeping anymore than that.

I would suggest that you check your current images and remove the ones that you will no longer want before doing this process as it will mean that you have to go through even more images.

When I went through my images to weed out the dups and bad images, I found 6 thousand images that I have no idea why I kept them for over the years.

Thanks Dennis for the tips and I will appy some of the stuff you mentioned here.

I like the folder idea that you mentioned and that will make it better to find the images, right now mine are all over the place that is why I asked this question for that reason.

[Tom Pryor]

Hi Tom,

Dennis has give you a good process for getting rid of the photos that you don't want to keep.
I also go threw all the photos take from the day and delete any that are blurry or no so good for what ever reason. I then process all the photos in photo shop crop, adjust levels ect. and then burn them to CD so I will have a backup in case the computer crashes. Then if needed you could delete some off your hard drive to free up space for more.

Good point Chuck. I went out yesterday and picked up an extrenal 1.5 TB drive for my backup for the images only.

[Tom Pryor]

Good point about the backup Chuck.

I don't trust CD's but that is me. I have a copy on the computer drive, one on my Drobo drives and one more copy on the Home Server. Once I go through the keepers, and move the images into there areas, a program called Mirror Folder will move the ones from the computer drives to the other 2 devices automatically for me.

But what ever works best, but a backup is a MUST. If not and you have a crash all those images are gone for good.

Thanks for the tip and I will have to look at the software that you mentioned, do they have a demo?

[Tom Pryor]

Man so far I have saved all mine and never deleted any of the photos good thing I don't have many but good to know where to start.

Wayne, I did the same as well, but it will catch up with you fast.