keeping every shot vs. culling

tntc

For me, a key purpose of smugmug is reliable storage. Letting friends see our pictures online is nice, but being our long term storage is most important. So I've always kept every shot on smugmug and hidden the bad shots.

But we recently came back from a two month trip with ~4500 more pictures. My wife was using "continuous mode" a lot and frankly a lot of the pictures are a waste of space. If I were to upload them, it would be a pain to hide so many of them.

So I'm torn. Do you keep every shot? On smugmug?

Advice?

mbellot

tntc wrote:

So I'm torn. Do you keep every shot? On smugmug?

Advice?

Keep them all? Generally yes, but I'm starting to re-think that now that I'm looking at buying a third 750GB drive. (SM doesn't support RAW files, so its not a great backup solution).

On SmugMug? No.

jfriend

tntc wrote:

For me, a key purpose of smugmug is reliable storage. Letting friends see our pictures online is nice, but being our long term storage is most important. So I've always kept every shot on smugmug and hidden the bad shots.

But we recently came back from a two month trip with ~4500 more pictures. My wife was using "continuous mode" a lot and frankly a lot of the pictures are a waste of space. If I were to upload them, it would be a pain to hide so many of them.

So I'm torn. Do you keep every shot? On smugmug?

Advice?

I make a first pass through and delete images that there's just no point in keeping. Besides taking storage and backup space, they just get in the way when processing the rest of your images. If it's obviously not a keeper, why keep it?

In my workflow, I mark it as deleted (which removes it from my view) and I only physically delete it from the disk sometime later when I'm pretty much done processing the shoot. That gives me the opportunity to recover a shot marked as deleted if, for some reason, I find I actually do want it (though that almost never happens).

When using continuous mode a lot, you have to be ruthless with the delete key, otherwise you just end up storing a ton of junk. It also reminds me that next time I should be more selective in continuous mode.

Disk space it cheap, but when you start factoring in backups (I have double disk backup for three total copies) and the pain of just managing a whole bunch of hard drives every time you have to upgrade, I find that it is worth making a first pass of deletes.

Art Scott

I like John above, use a 3 drive storage system.
As a convert from a few decades of using film, I started out saving EVERY frame shot....then read an article (do not remember the author) that stated if he had culled a few of negs and slides his library would be smaller and much better......the author recommended that if the photo was totally unusable even as an abstract toss it.....but if it could be manipulated into a piece of Fine Art( charcoal, line drawing.....anything where being 100% tack sharp in focus did not actually matter) then save it to be manipulated......if an idea comes to your mind...add the idea to name of file so you don't forget what you intended to do with the file....................

Mohamed.Ghuloom

I usually delete the photos that I'm sure there is no use of them. Now that doesn't mean every blurry picture. Actually some of them CAN be used

Then I start flagging (with lightroom) those pictures I really like and would like to present to my client or use or upload to smugmug, doesn't matter.

After that I start editing those flagged ones, and then after editing, I compare them together, and unflag some.

Now that I have 100% great shots, I upload them for my client, or in case of advertisement pictures, I give them in a DVD to the client. In some cases that ONLY one picture is needed for the client, I tend to review those final flagged ones with family and use the compare feature in lightroom and end up only with one.

How is that working for ya?