Is anyone else a photo hoarder??

I am trying to edit my photos from our recent Alaska trip.

As I take the photos I say, I will take lots it's easy to delete the bad ones. But once I get home, I have a hard time pressing the delete button!!!

Sure the ones that are really bad and out of focus is an easy decision, but the multiples at just a slightly different angle or setting ...yikes - I'll decide later.

...and oh yes, the bad ones....well maybe we can fix it with cropping, contrast, shadow, etc, etc. I can't even let those go without trying a fix. Geesh!

I can't even delete memory cards now ....you never know when you need the original shots :rolleyes:

Does anyone else have this problem :D ?

I've managed to avoid the problem by having a few different stages of 'deletes' in my galleries.

The first stage is as you do - as soon as I load the photos from the camera to the computer, I immediately go through a quick slideshow of them all - writing down the photo number of the ones that didn't come out as good - focus issues, too dark, composition not right, etc...and some duplicates if it's obvious that one is superior to the others. Those get deleted immediately.

Then I can set about cropping, editing, culling, etc, where I put together the gallery of the final 'keepers' - picking one out of those 3-4 duplicates, deciding some are just redundant or don't tell enough of a story, or maybe I previously took a better photo of the same thing. Once I'm done with that, I often go back to those duplicate photos that originally passed muster, and delete the ones that I didn't choose for the final gallery. That's my 2nd cull.

Then my third and final cull is done once per year. I go through all my photos taken during that year, with my screen in split view - final processed/edited/cropped gallery on the left, original downloads from camera on right...and I delete a vast majority of photos which I never decided to edit or use. I figure if a year went by and I never went back to that gallery to pull up that photo and give it some kind of rework or edit, then I don't need it.

As an example, when I go birding each weekend I might take 500-700 photos - lots of bursts and tracking of flying subjects, so there are always lots of duplicates or sequence shots. After the very first cull in step 1, I might be down to 250-300 shots I decided to keep. Then after step 2, the cull after the cropping and processing, I may go back in and delete a further 50-75 shots...leaving about 200 originals, and 40-60 total 'keepers' in my display final gallery. At the end of the year, I'll go back through those originals, and typically knock out all but the 40-60 originals from which I derived my final keeper copies...maybe hanging onto 5-10 shots that I still felt someday I might like to use...which dumps another 130-150 shots from that set.

I typically see 5GB of photos go down to 2.8GB of photos after the first and second culls - that's every weekend and every trip. Each year-end cull will typically knock down about 140-200GB from my harddrive. With many years of digital photography under my belt, I have about 1 TB of photos, even with all that culling. I always keep the originals of any photo I process or edit, so I always have 2 copies of any keeper. My goal is to keep my galleries from getting too large or out of hand - without all the culling I'd easily be over 3 terrabytes by now. With final keepers and all the culls, I'm probably adding around 150GB of photos per year to my drive. I'm not a hoarder, but I still have a wagonload of photos!

The first thing I do is download the images from my SD cards (I tend to put in a new card every day or two). Next, I make a copy on two external hard drives (one at home and one goes to the office) so I have three copies of the originals. Then, I set up a directory called "keepers" or "show" and the good ones go there, after being processed (if necessary).

This is a major problem for me as well. I probably have 10 terabytes of photos on various hard drives. I also have more than 200 DVDs of backed up photos. (I keep two copies of every file as backup.)

I typically end up with three versions of every shot - the original RAW or NEF file right out of the camera, the converted JPEG version that has undergone basic edits, and the final edited JPEG. When I store the photos to external drives I only store the first and third versions - I can always reconvert the RAW files to recreate the converted JPEGs.

It's a real challenge to look at four similar shots and delete two or three of them. It would be like cutting up strips of negatives and throwing some negatives away. This comes up a lot as I shoot any event photography in continuous mode, so there are lots of duplicates. The problem is, if there are five similar pictures, close inspection may reveal that #2 and #5 are the best . . . but giving this amount of inspection to over 1000 pictures I may shoot in a day is TIME CONSUMING. LOL

It is a problem, I agree with you. So far, my best solution has been to buy more external hard drives. hehehehe

I'm probably adding around 150GB of photos per year to my drive. I'm not a hoarder, but I still have a wagonload of photos!

I guess that's my point .....do we really need a wagonload of photos? Will we ever use them/ look at them. It's soooooo hard to dump them isn't it:p

I guess that's my point .....do we really need a wagonload of photos? Will we ever use them/ look at them. It's soooooo hard to dump them isn't it:p

That's a tough call. Need? Probably not. But I also admit I go back to many of those photos from an old trip, old family photos, looking back to how a place looked 20 years ago compared to today. And so on. I keep my photos in folders by event & date, and separated into larger categories, ie: cruises, vacations, disney, birds and wildlife, portraits, landscapes, and so on.

It's a carryover from film days - I still have 10 shoeboxes full of prints from film days, and until recently had 60 slide carousels in my closet. I took the time to buy slide archive boxes and moved all the slides to those, so they take up no more space than a shirtbox. I still like to have those memories - trips and places - to be able to look back on.

Digital prints have the same purpose for me - most of the ones I keep have some specific cause - I've whittled down the overall number of photos from certain trips after many years, where I might have kept a few extra shots that helped tell the 'slideshow' story, and now I just want to keep landmarks and special moments.

What I always consider when thinking about whether to keep some of these older trips and photos...how many trips did I take, places I've gone, and things I witnessed that I DIDN'T take photos of, and wish I had? That regret is what makes me want to keep the ones I have, so a day doesn't come in the future talking to a child about something I saw or did that would interest him, but alas, I deleted those photos! I'd rather be able to bring them up, to show and share and also to remember.

The fine line is figuring out just how much to save to be able to remember and tell the story without being buried un-necessarily by too many images that are difficult to sort through or find. That's where my culls come in!

Yes,it is hard to get rid of photos. I can not exactly say how many I have on my computer at home, copy on laptop and also on PC at work (major topics). I even go futher as to pre-digital photos, I have boxes and boxes of actual photos. :eek: . Wife keeps saying why don't we throw them out. :eek: I say never know when I might want to look through them all to find a photo of something. :D Just cannot sem to trash the memories.

The Ump

John

Currently running 95,000 photos on my hard drive. Interestingly they are almost all digital. Have digitized about 500 of old photos. I have no problem with deleting culls, but it as others have said soooooo hard to hit the delete key.

Valiamo!

For sports and scenic I usually delete all but the best. For candid people and vacation family I keep them all. As I look back thru my folders near similar pictures of people are most special and scenic etc. not even worth a second glance

I guess that's my point .....do we really need a wagonload of photos? Will we ever use them/ look at them. It's soooooo hard to dump them isn't it:p

Even with memory being cheap, it is hard to let tens of thousands of "extra" photos clog up my harddrives. So I've tried to get better about deleting.

But I understand the pain, it's hard to push the delete button on photos that don't necessarily have big flaws.

So I take the opposite approach -- I go through all my photos in lightroom, and I star the keepers. If I see 10 shots of the same basic landscape, I start the 1-3 that really stand out. As I run through the family photos, I start the really standout shots -- I have enough posed portraits of the kids, that I don't need to keep every new one taken. So I just star the really great ones or otherwise significant ones. If I took 20 shots of the kids playing at the pool, I'll star 2 or 3 of them, which is probably still too many.

If there is a flawed shot, but it's my only shot of something very significant... if it looks salvageable in Photoshop, I'll give it 1 star.

Then I hold my breath --- I go to the menu and "select all unrated" photos -- Holding my breath, I delete all of them. If they weren't good enough to be among the best, then time to go.

Then I'll go back to the 1-2 star pictures, see if they can be saved in Photoshop.. check again for duplicates. And take my best of the best, and upload them, put them in albums, whatever.

I have to admit I have this problem too. I ended up buying an external HD just for my huge collection of pictures. That way I don't have to ever delete any of them (even though I know I'll probably never even look at most of them again once I have picked my favorites). :D

My name is Dave and I am a recovering photo hoarder...

I have become far more "brutal" in my reviews of new captures which is a departure from my just-in-case retention policy of the past. I am in a (probably) year-long project to go back to tag and cull the true keepers from the 100,000 or so images in my library. (It's not as bad as it sounds, the burst shooting dupes were never retained and blurries were always chopped.) Lightroom has made cleanup far easier than it used to be with ratings and mark for delete. I still use Picasa to locate specific images since it has a superior search engine and it's facial recognition is an excellent tagging tool. (No regrets about my move to Lightroom.)

Main storage on my system is "generous" with redundant backup keeping everything safe so space isn't an issue. I just feel that the process of going through all the old images will help me see where my perspective may have changed and maybe I'll come up with a more efficient method of storing them for easy retrieval.

Dave

I'm a firm believer in keeping everything. For my wife and I, lately that means roughly 1TB/year. So...about every two years, I head to Best Buy and buy four 2TB drives. One goes onto our Wifi router so all of our computers can access it. The second/third/fourth go into an offsite backups rotation (one to my office, one to my parents' house, the third is at home for "occasional" sync-up then delivery to whichever site has the oldest off-site backup).

I read a great article years ago about a photographer who was shooting for TIME. Every memory card he shot went straight to TIME for 18 months, then they became available to him. When the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke, he sent an intern to the archives for three days to seek out a shot that he knew he had: in a black room, he was shooting from behind Clinton over Clinton's shoulder, and smack in the center of the crowd (magically beneath a can light directly above) was Monica Lewinsky. Someday, I'll have a reason to go through my archives for something like this, and I want EVERY shot just in case.

Our workflow is built around Lightroom. My wife and I treat things differently, but I just import all of the pictures, give them all a 5-star rating, then tell Lightroom to only show me pics with 3+ stars. I whiz through everything, demoting obvious duds to 1 star and obviously flawed shots 2 stars. I start over, and adjust LR to only show 4+ stars, then demote the less-stellar shots to 3 stars. One more crack to thin out the near-duplicates and get the best of the best. This method, though it seems repetitive, allowed us to go through the 15,000 images (nearly 350GB) from our recent cruise in about 16 hours.

So...I encourage you to not delete, and instead find a workflow that works for you. It could be as simple as Picasa, with just one star available - give everything a star, select the starred images, then unstar the ones that aren't so great. Go through again, unstarring the near-duplicates. Adapt and evolve as you see fit.

I agree with you, Peety. You never know what picture will be valuable in the future.

The other thing is, you never know what advancements will be made in the future that might salvage a bad picture from the past, turning it into a good - or even acceptable - shot. Think of what HDR can do for shots where the dynamic range exceeds what one photo will capture, for example. Who knows what new capabilities we might see in the future.

I can see deleting out obviously blurred shots, possibly some of the redundant shots, but overall I'd rather keep the library of images as intact as possible. I wouldn't cut up negative strips to throw out bad shots, and I guess I carry that mindset into the digital world, flawed as the mindset may be LOL.

If you use a good naming convention for your folders and photos, you can make a huge library of photos easy to sort through.

Just to clarify...

By "brutal", I mean that an obviously blurry shot gets axed and a series of burst shots with little or no variation is analyzed and only good captures with significant variance are retained. Culling of the old shots will mirror this method and probably won't remove more than 10% of the volume since I have always shot pretty discriminately having been brought up on film (and not a pro or wealthy! :))

I also retain un-edited originals of shots that aren't corrected virtually via Lightroom.

I think the tagging is going to be the biggest improvement since the files are always given a significant name and the folders and sub-folders are cleanly categorized.

A tip for tagging: use the facial recognition in Picasa to ID people and write the tags to the EXIF. Import metadata changes afterwards in Lightroom. This allows you to use the metadata search in LR without ducking out to Picasa.

Dave

Over the years I have not hoarded so many photos if they don't please my eye they I delete them and I only make photo books of the very best 25-50 snapshots. :)

you really might look at them again, or need a particular shot or .....(grin)

Seriously, I download all my photos to my hard drive, export/backup them all. Then I delete off my computer any shot that I don't think is good or any shot that I don't want anyone else to see as my photos also serve as my screen saver.

Since I am going to have external hard drives for back up anyway (documents, spreadsheets, databases) I don't see the problem in having one more (or five) for photos.

-Holly

who thinks that 3 camera bodies and 13 lenses is not unreasonable. No more than having a pocket camera, an underwater camera and a tripod and a LoPro & Tamarack backpacks....

Memory and high capacity external hard drives (1tb+) are so cheap these days why worry about it. I just shoot everything in RAW then convert into DNG upon importing into LR. I just go through and delete the really obvious bad ones then rename the current imported batch (I use the XXX2014-# as my number system) them backup to external hard drive. Then when I get some free time I go through and thin the herd so my laptop hd is not overloaded. I have everything on my external HD if i for some reason need to return and get some back.

If you have enough space on your hard drive, why worry? 10 years ago, I did not own a camera. Today, I have five (use three of them regularly) and have amassed nearly 20,000 photos on my computer--lots of duplicates. I have a terabyte of space on my computer so, no problem with space. I have my computer's screen saver set to random and it is so neat to see one time a photo from Ireland, another from Italy, another from Paris, etc. Also, I use I photo to make slide shows of the trips and post them on YouTube. So, just get lots of space on your computer and don't worry.

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If you have enough space on your hard drive, why worry? 10 years ago, I did not own a camera. Today, I have five (use three of them regularly) and have amassed nearly 20,000 photos on my computer--lots of duplicates. I have a terabyte of space on my computer so, no problem with space. I have my computer's screen saver set to random and it is so neat to see one time a photo from Ireland, another from Italy, another from Paris, etc. Also, I use I photo to make slide shows of the trips and post them on YouTube. So, just get lots of space on your computer and don't worry.

I see some issues that you should address:

1) Why duplicates? I encourage you to develop a standardized filing system that will grow with you, and only keep one copy. What better way to know that you have them all? If you keep random duplicates, how do you know if "that file there" (pretends to point at a file) is a duplicate?

2) As digital photography improves, space on your computer will NOT keep up. My wife and I are pushing 5TB of photos (though I admit I'm sure we're on the high side), and there's no reasonable way to keep 5TB on a computer. The only option is external drives.

3) What are you doing for backups? If you get a new computer, how do you know if you've successfully transferred all of your pictures to the new computer?

...there's no reasonable way to keep 5TB on a computer...

"Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive. An important step forward in storage, the 8TB hard disk drive provides scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage and back-up disaster recovery storage."

Technology marches on...:)

Dave

"Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive. An important step forward in storage, the 8TB hard disk drive provides scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage and back-up disaster recovery storage."

 

Technology marches on...:)

Congratulations, you're cool, you shot my post full of holes. I quit, I'm gonna go hide under a rock now, clearly I'm clueless.

Now, back to reality: most home computers are not built around the cloud content, object storage, and/or back-up disaster recovery industries. It's $530 for one drive, which is not REASONABLE in a home computer (you wouldn't or at least shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket).

Congratulations, you're cool, you shot my post full of holes. I quit, I'm gonna go hide under a rock now, clearly I'm clueless.

 

Now, back to reality: most home computers are not built around the cloud content, object storage, and/or back-up disaster recovery industries. It's $530 for one drive, which is not REASONABLE in a home computer (you wouldn't or at least shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket).

It was kind of funny...I read your post and when I went to my news feed five minutes later, there was Seagate's announcement.

Yeah, the darn things are too expansive for now. I would love to have unlimited funds to play with this stuff but even if I did, I'd still have all the images in three other places like I do now. Can't agree enough about the multi-basket advice.

Dave

I totally agree with you but, the thought of going through all those photos and sorting out the "unnecessaries" is mind boggling. I guess I will leave that chore to my grandchildren. I have two computers; a Mac G4 and a Mac G5. The G4 is basically a storage unit. It is connected directly to the G5 so, anytime I need something, I just bring it to the G5 to work on it.

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