Keep 'em all or delete a ton - what do you do?

eoren1 · June 15, 2008

I have to admit that I've been more of a keeper than a deleter. I would basically delete all photos that were blurry and most where my subjects had their eyes closed. Everything else would be kept. As I hit the 30,000 image mark in Lightroom, and coinciding with a move to an external drive/mac for managing my photos, I've decided to revisit this issue.
I am now going through the photos I have of my children (as my 2 1/2 year old is responsible for 1/2 of the 30,000 images mentioned). I have the shots rated as:
1 star - 'documentary'; a technically okay shot that serves to remind me of something the kids did but that will never go beyond the computer
2 stars - 'good'; a good shot that may be one in a series that wasn't quite as well-timed as others
3 stars - 'great'; these are the ones that I will go through after my first rating work and choose to process and upload to smugmug. I mark those that are processed with a 'pick' flag
4 stars - 'excellent'
5 stars - 'best'
I have not been using these much - instead relying on the 'pick' flag to help me sort later on.

Now that months (and sometimes years) have passed since my taking these shots, I am going through them and finding little reason to keep the 2 star shots. They are often flanked by better ones and so I have started to delete these. In a typical month, I may have 200-300 shots of my son and I'm finding that I can consistently drop this to 100 true keepers after judicious use of the 'reject' flag and deletions. I plan to also push some of the photos into the 4/5 star catagory during this process.

Though storage is cheap, the extra photos serve little purpose at this point other than taking up room. Have to admit that that first act of deleting photos was really hard...
How do you feel about keeping them all or deleting judiciously?
E

mwgrice · June 16, 2008

It's a tough call. I've found that the best shots from a session aren't always immediately obvious to me. I have also sometimes found other uses for some of the ones without any great artistic or technical merit (backgrounds, collages, panoramas, even selling my house), and sentimental value in others. For instance, since my parents died I don't have the heart to delete any photos of them. Fortunately, storage has been tending to get cheaper over time, although backups are always a pain (and require discipline I don't always have).

My current strategy is to keep everything except the truly obviously bad. A couple of times a year, after the pictures have been around for a year, I will evaluate my storage situation and delete some if I feel it's necessary.

webwizard · June 16, 2008

When I was shooting film, I was merciless in my editng and threw away a lot of stuff that was technically OK but not great images. When I switched to digital, I started keeping a lot more stuff. I have about 13,000 images. I'm saving everything right now. With PS, I found I can take an image that I would have thrown away and make it better or combine it with other images as part of a creative process.

eoren1 · June 16, 2008

You're right, it is a tough call. And one answer is to just keep everything. I guess my concern is that, since I seem to average 6000 photos per child per year, going back to review them later will be overwhelming. My goal is to cut this down to 1200-1500 keepers per kid per year which should be a bit more manageable. I definitely see the point about rescuing photos. However, the other arguement is that I shoot 10 frames in the field hoping to get one with tack-sharp focus, eyes open and a cute expression. If I get one of those, the other 9 can/should be tossed unless they provide some other great expression.
Thanks again for your input.
E

Duffy Pratt · June 18, 2008

My goal is to throw away everything I possibly can, and then some. If I go out and take 100 pictures, I will try to reduce the set to maybe 10 in the editing process. Typically, I'm not strong enough to cull that deeply, so I might end up with 20.

Then, every few months I will go through my collection and try to eliminate the worst of what's left. So, out of the 20 that I kept, I might get it down to 10 or so. Eventually, with enough repetition, the session of 100 shots might yield anywhere from 0 to 6 or 8 pictures worth keeping.

Even that number is probably too generous. If I have 10 really good pictures at the end of a year, and another 10 with real sentimental value, then I would consider it a great year. Also, I find that when I eliminate the questionable pictures it becomes much more fun to go through what is left.

Storage is cheap, but time is expensive. And I think its a bit poisonous to go repeatedly over my mediocrities. I understand that my opinions on this are in the minority.

I don't do much in the way of compositing (basically nothing), so preserving material for backgrounds doesn't apply in my case.

Duffy

SloYerRoll · June 18, 2008

Duffy Pratt wrote:

If I go out and take 100 pictures, I will try to reduce the set to maybe 10 in the editing process. Typically, I'm not strong enough to cull that deeply, so I might end up with 20.

I don't TRY to delete shots, but essentially I do the same. I can shoot up to 500 shots if I'm just shooting around. I'll be stoked if I walk away w/ 30 keepers.

I'm incredibly picky w/ my shots though. I'm even more brutal w/ my older shots. Sometimes I'll dig through the archives and look at my "keepers" and have no idea why I thought that shot was good.

To each their own though. No one can answer this question but yourself.

webwizard · June 18, 2008

Glad to see someone else admit their emotional reluctance to discard a photo even though it may not be the best. I've started spending more time on the computer playing with parts of old images to see how what I can do creatively (ha!). Now I'm even more reluctant to delete anything! Even the bad ones could turn into some impressionist art or a digital Jackson Pollock clone.

KED · June 19, 2008

eoren1 wrote:

You're right, it is a tough call. And one answer is to just keep everything. I guess my concern is that, since I seem to average 6000 photos per child per year, going back to review them later will be overwhelming. My goal is to cut this down to 1200-1500 keepers per kid per year which should be a bit more manageable. I definitely see the point about rescuing photos. However, the other arguement is that I shoot 10 frames in the field hoping to get one with tack-sharp focus, eyes open and a cute expression. If I get one of those, the other 9 can/should be tossed unless they provide some other great expression.
Thanks again for your input.
E

I FEEL A STRONG URGE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THIS!! (I'll stop shouting now). My kids are MUCH older than yours (14 - 20 YO) and I have only been taking photography seriously for a year (+/- 7,000 retained images). My suggestion: KEEP EVERYTHING (that is, everything that is not crap right out of the camera)! Disk space is cheap and gets cheaper all the time; memories are priceless. When your now-2YO has graduated from college in 20 years you will be sitting around with nothing to do and you will cherish the opportunity to sort through all those images.

SloYerRoll · June 20, 2008

KED wrote:

I FEEL A STRONG URGE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THIS!! (I'll stop shouting now). My kids are MUCH older than yours (14 - 20 YO) and I have only been taking photography seriously for a year (+/- 7,000 retained images). My suggestion: KEEP EVERYTHING (that is, everything that is not crap right out of the camera)! Disk space is cheap and gets cheaper all the time; memories are priceless. When your now-2YO has graduated from college in 20 years you will be sitting around with nothing to do and you will cherish the opportunity to sort through all those images.

I know these are opinions and I'm not refuting yours. I'm just providing a different perspective.
I feel the same way about cherishing memories. I've been fortunate enough to be into photography before my daughter was born. So I've been able to capture all here moments to date.

When I get all old and do a keyword search for my daughter when she was young and eating ice cream. I don't want to sort through 500 shots of my daughter making a royal mess of everything

. I want the keepers that I'd be proud to show. (20-30 maybe?)

Again, this is JMO:
I believe if you keep too many personal shots. Your collection will eventually reach a saturation point where it's not even fun to look at or find an image you really want to see w/o culling through 100's of shots.

If you shoot professionally. I don't ever think there's a good reason to delete unless it's obvious junk. Those images are a potential source of revenue that cost you next to nothing to store for retrieval.

YMMV.

-Jon

Miguel Delinquento · June 20, 2008

Like others here I can relate to your situation. I'm pushing 23K images in Lightroom over 4-5 years of shooting digital. i don't have the patience for a detailed star system. Mine are either 5-star wonders, picks for something worthy to investigate, and un-ranked that are good enough to provide history of an event in our lives.
I throw away about 35% of each card's images on average. Sometimes it is hard to know whether a shot will be valuable in the moment. Especially if your parents or loved ones are elderly and they live 3200 miles from your kids.
I have four internal hard drives in my Mac Pro and a 750G external backup drive, plus three smaller external drives. Storage is cheap and I stopped caring about that. What matters is proper organization and my ability to quickly get at the 5-stars stuff for art shows.

M

eoren1 · June 20, 2008

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one grappling with this...

I had been keeping them all until a recent decision to move my library to an external and start working off the macbook (instead of a PC). That prompted an attempt to tidy up the library and I began to notice the crap that was in my collection. From there, it wasn't long before I started to look at a stack of photos and realize that I really didn't need 10 shots of my kid in a particular outfit/location when 1 or 2 really good ones would satisfy my immediate and long term goals.

Considering that I will have a dSLR for the entirety of my children't lives, if I continued at the present pace, I would end up with 100,000 photos of each by the time they were 18!! With a more restrictive view of holding on to photos, I'm hoping to bring that number down to 20,000 (100 per month). Regardless of the quality of my keywords and tags, plowing through that number of photos would be daunting - especially if I hadn't already weeded out the 'extras'.

While storage is indeed cheap, it won't be long before I trade in my 8 megapixel Canon 350D for a 12, 14 or 24 megapixel model. And who knows what size these files will be in 5, 10 or 15 years. It just seems more practical to do the screening now than later.
Thanks again for everyone's input.
E

Tee Why · June 20, 2008

I like to delete a lot and only keep what I think are the best ones.
I don't have time to go through thousands of images looking for something nor do I want huge CF cards or hardrives just holding onto pics that I won't upload or print.

TBT · June 22, 2008

I have this same situation (something like 50K pictures) most of are my daughter.

I fall somewhere between keep only the best and keeping everything. More towards the keeping everything end of the spectrum. If a picture is repetitive or unquestionably bad I will delete it. But if I have any doubt I will keep it.

Once I had what looked like a totaly 100% black picture. I thought I had left the lens cap on. I was going to delete it but for the heck of it, I did a little PP and out pops a (very noisy) picture of my daughter sleeping.

Regarding

"When I get all old and do a keyword search for my daughter when she was young and eating ice cream. I don't want to sort through 500 shots of my daughter making a royal mess of everything

. I want the keepers that I'd be proud to show. (20-30 maybe?)"

This quote made me think of two things:

1. Someone might actually like the messy shots better. For example my wife occasionaly has an opinion...

2. If the photos are correctly tagged with meta data and an application that recognizes that meta data is used, it should be simple to sort on "daughter" "before age X" "not messy" or "rated 5 or better".

I guess it's all about managing complexity. If you can't handle it, delete everything, if you want to keep everything use meta data obsesively.

Final thought: I think slow image viewers really contribute to the overhead of viewing and rating pictures. I've started to use "fastpictureviewer" which (at least for jpeg) is IPTC4XMP compliant (does vista/LR style ratings, LR color labels) 100/300% zoom and most of all is amazingly fast:

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com

The situation will get worse but I have a boxes and boxes of film I have yet to scan.

SloYerRoll · June 22, 2008

TBT wrote:

Regarding

"When I get all old and do a keyword search for my daughter when she was young and eating ice cream. I don't want to sort through 500 shots of my daughter making a royal mess of everything . I want the keepers that I'd be proud to show. (20-30 maybe?)"

This quote made me think of two things

Glad I made you think

DawnAllynn · June 23, 2008

I have been better in the past about cleaning up my images, when I have time I like to delete the worst of it and keep what i think might be worth looking at or editing later. But sometimes I take so many shots in such a short time that I end up dumping them all on my computer, and then when I have time I back everything up to DVD or CD. I really need to not back up the crap shots, but by then I am not in the mood to go through a weeks worth of images, I'd never get t go outside again if I spent that much time in front of the computer. The answer is to cull when I do the shots, I just need to get better organized.

jasonstone · June 24, 2008

Looks like this is an issue for a lot of us - me too...

I can shoot off 100 pics in a few mins just of one of my kids because they're running around like mad and i've no idea if when i'm going to get "that" expression - the perfect one....

When it comes to importing them well.... storage is cheap so i tend to keep both the RAW _and_ the JPG (Nikon D80 RAW+JPG Fine) - 12MB or something like that per photo

Fill 2GB or more up in a day or less not a problem...

Here's what i do

Import all RAW into Lightroom and all JPG into iPhoto (use the JPG for quick web galleries for family to see - Lightroom for any excellent shots that could be that 5% better with some post processing (which is almost all photos now that i'm getting use to LR but hey no TIME!))

1. Delete the total rubbish e.g. I missed what I was taking the photo of, or else it's totally blurry or I was trying something out that didn't work

Exception - if I'm on holidays and I only get one photo of something (rare) and it's slightly blurred I'll keep it as it will be the only way for me to remmeber it - my memory is terrible i forget everything in 2 seconds

2. I usually take multiple photos of things so if I've got some that clearly don't match up to the quality of the others I'll delete them too

3. Now I've got the photos I like - but still way too many - but I don't delete anymore... storage is cheap enough that I'd rather keep all my photos... BUT....

4. Now I go through and in iPhoto I'll hide (latest version of iPhoto required) the ones that are OK but not the best ones - but with the kids sometimes I like the action movement in a series of photos.

5. In Lightroom ideally I'd stack the photos I've hidden behind the photo I've decided to keep. It's not an issue as Lightroom is anyway just a database and doesn't move the RAW files

So that's my method

I don't ever have time to go back through all the old photos to decide what I'll keep and I'll delete - but I sometimes go back through them to have a look

The key I think it just getting better at deciding which ones you really can delete...

Just my $0.02c

Cheers, Jase

claudermilk · June 24, 2008

I do more-or-less the same thing. Total garbage shots (missed the subject, OOF, otherwise technically unsaveable) get trashed. Everything else gets rated & only the better couple of ratings get any more attention & converted to JPEG. Otherwise the RAW gets stored. Drives are getting cheaper & cheaper.

photocat · June 24, 2008

I have shifted from keeping everything to be very picky. I shoot around 20.000 pics a year, and even with cheap storage, when will we ever have the time to go back and redo them all? I do save a first version on dvd, after I culled out the bad ones, and I am pretty ruth less in my first go, but then I toss more as I work through them. I have become more picky in what I shoot too, as I am getting really tired of sitting and watch 30 shots that are practically all almost the same. Now and then I do find forgotten gems, but most of the time, I struggle to keep up with the ones I take the last.
I think it is a normal process to after you become a better photographer, to have learned to look with a better eye, so you can see the bad ones more easily.
I tend to rate my pics, four is pretty good, 5 is only for Getty (supposed I would ever be accepted by Getty - not much fives in my library - close to none), the 3's are doubts or maybe's. If pics don't even get a 3 I chuck them.
The longer I shoot, the more I toss and the less I shoot to have less work after the shoot. It is a steep learning curve... I would rather have 3 good shots then 49 mediocre, so I try to get the best shot I can in camera.
To make a novel short: I toss without regret and am pretty harsh. If I don't see a story in a photograph, it goes too.

The bin is my biggest friend...

I also don't try to save bad pics anymore, if they have been taken bad, there is usually no saving possible. Not so far that they still could be used for paid jobs anyway.

jasonstone · June 25, 2008

photocat wrote:

I would rather have 3 good shots then 49 mediocre, so I try to get the best shot I can in camera.

I totally agree, the only exception for me is photos of my kids.
I may have 1 that I would love to print and get framed but the other 20 or 30 just "ok" ones - well they're not bad per se - just not as good as that 1 to print

But I don't want to delete the just OK ones as they're part of the story of them growing up.

When it comes to other subjects then I'm much more ruthless

Richard · June 25, 2008

Magnetic storage is so cheap that it has ceased to be a consideration at all for me. What does matter is my time, both in processing pics and looking for them later. Over time, I have become more and more ruthless about deleting, as I have learned that in reality, I don't ever go back and reprocess marginal shots. I always have new, and hopefully better ones to deal with. Although I have been using a DAM database ever since I got serious about photography, I have not been as meticulous as I should have been about keywording. There is little point to keeping pics around if you do not have a quick way to find them.

photocat · June 25, 2008

I have not been as meticulous as I should have been about keywording. There is little point to keeping pics around if you do not have a quick way to find them.

Here here Richard. Keywording is indeed essential. I guess we can not ever focus on that one enough. If you have thousands and thousands of pics, if you don't keyword you are a newborn baby... clueless.
I have started with a final workflow that puts in keywording and other tags the minute it comes from the flash card. I use Thom Hogan his Nikon workflow. (I know, did not invent it myself, but why not listen to the masters) - and I have been really happy lately. Also because it does transport the keywords into the stock library settings.
If nothing else, we should breathe keywording...

TBT · June 25, 2008

photocat wrote:

Here here Richard. Keywording is indeed essential. I guess we can not ever focus on that one enough. If you have thousands and thousands of pics, if you don't keyword you are a newborn baby... clueless.

I use Thom Hogan his Nikon workflow.

photocat

Keywording is an art to itself. Do it wrong and you end up with a jumbled mess. Is it Fourth of July or 4th of July etc. There is the concept of "Controlled Vocabulary" or Photo Mechanics "Structured Keywords" to maintain consistency across pictures but I've found nothing universally definitive. Perhapse the field of journalism offers some sort of UPI or API standard?

In theory if there was a definitive keyword set one jpeg could be loaded with all the keywords and importing that photo into your library would import all of the standard tags. Such a concept seems common sense but I can find nothing referencing shuch a keyword/tag seeding photo.

Whatever you do avoid importing "gallery player" jpegs into any keywording app. I had to delete my database for Windows Live Gallery 2008 because a handful of gallery player jpegs "poisoned" my keyword library with over 600 keywords.

Regarding workflow:

Where can I find information on your/Thom Hogan's workflow.

I just spent a few minutes at http://www.bythom.com/index.htm and can't find anything.

THANKS!

photocat · June 25, 2008

TBT wrote:

photocat

Keywording is an art to itself. Do it wrong and you end up with a jumbled mess. Is it Fourth of July or 4th of July etc. There is the concept of "Controlled Vocabulary" or Photo Mechanics "Structured Keywords" to maintain consistency across pictures but I've found nothing universally definitive. Perhapse the field of journalism offers some sort of UPI or API standard?

I bought Thom Hogans manual for the D300. That had some workflow sheets that I found to be very useful. For the first time in years I have a working flow now, tagged and in the right places. Phew...

Keywording is very difficult for me as I am dutch speaking living in UK, and I mingle with americans and brits, so I never know what expression is american or which one is british. I am also very bad in logic reasoning, UPI and API belongs to a world I know nothing off. I need computer language on toddler level. I also still make spelling mistakes, which can be a drag too.

If I put keywords in when I import via Nikon Transfer, they do go over into View NX and or NX, and do export to tiff into aperture. The last step before uploading for stock is exporting them to jpeg from aperture according to the requirements of the agencies. The quality of the images is better with this workflow. I only use photoshop if I need to do layer jobs or some extreme cloning...

claudermilk · June 25, 2008

Agreed, keywording is both critically important and vaguely defined. I heavily leverage my DAM's categorizing function to create my controlled vocabulary; essentially my categories are my keywords & what I use to search by. I use a script to convert the categories into IPTC keywords which get embedded into the image and trvel with it to my SM site.

You have to really stay on top of the keywording as it will become a huge job very quickly. I've gotten good at grabbing older similar shoots to kick-start a keywording session and tweaking it from there. That's a big time-saver. I also don't get too exhaustive with it. It's a balance between having enough terms to successfully search on and spending too much time itemizing every last little thing in the image.

sit · June 25, 2008

I wind up deleting about 30% of the images I take because of motion/exposure/focus problems or because I missed the moment or caught the same-moment in a burst. Pictures that seem like they have potential get one star and then as I work on them I may give them more stars. I may also later increase stars if they are well received by my wife, friends, clients, etc.

For most random social events I attend, a picture with any stars gets shared; for clients, I'll probably use two-star plus as selects and provide lower-res versions of the one-star images which may not have received the same level of attention.

After a few weeks, I'm sure I could go back and delete no-star pictures without ever missing them. However, they've come in handy for parties where someone wants a picture of themselves with so-and-so (even if it is a terrible shot), or in theory if someone wanted to do some photoshop work to merge things.

Does anyone use the keyword vocabulary from controlledvocabulary.com? Thoughts?

TBT · June 27, 2008

sit wrote:

Does anyone use the keyword vocabulary from controlledvocabulary.com? Thoughts?

I was just looking at that!

The latest photo mechanic includes a subset of that vocabulary for the PM structured keywords.

thoughts:

Is CV.com popular and used/loved by all? Are the CV keywords a "standard" for keywording?

$70 per product for 11,000 words. Thougt is that's pricey for an amatuer and I really don't want 11,000 tags. Too bad CV does not offer a subset for home users. (standard and pro editions?)

Eileron · June 30, 2008

I end up keeping every image in some form or another, thanks to the wonders of keeping "backups" on the internet. I don't keep every raw though, as realistically it's highly unlikely I'll go back and process any image I didn't go through and process the first time.

Keeping every image provides for keeping all the memories. This is my personal workflow though; if I shot a wedding, for example, or for a pro site my workflow would change. I don't use smugmug at current to show off any pictures, just as a photo repository for my parents and friends to see what I'm doing. If I did, I'd probably buy another pro account, which would be paid for with any photog. sells, and would probably keep far less files overall.

My personal workflow is relatively simple, although not entirely ideal from my views.

Two cameras:
D80 - shooting Raw.
SD870 - shooting Jpeg.

Philosophy:
Online ASAP, Go back to process RAWs.

Jpeg:

I use Smugmug as a combination photo-viewer for family and friends, and an online full-jpeg storage solution (the non-ideal part).

Jpegs go into iPhoto, which go onto Smugmug. I rarely go through and cull images this way, mostly because of time involved, and because I know my family/friends would rather see too many pictures than wait.

I split albums into typical max 500 images (usually closer to 200); I dedicate 1-2 days a week to going through and keywording a single album. Except for weeks I shoot every day, everything gets keyworded.

It limits me to using Smugmug, but I haven't had any problem with that so far. The Jpegs are typically deleted as they're put on Smugmug, as I don't have a local backup solution.

Raw:

Use conversion mechanism (originally Aperture, but switching to Lightroom once I have to buy one due to educational discount bringing LR to 99$) to create Jpegs of images, which are then ported into iPhoto for uploading with the rest.

Raw selection process (update stars to 1, then go through 1s and update some to 2, 2s to 3s, etc.). Delete rejects, and typically 1s, 2s, and 3s.

Process 4s, 5s. Convert and upload to new gallery on Smugmug (or process for selling, whenever I get around to viewing my hobby as a means to make some money on the side).

Save Raws with Jungledisk, save processed tiffs on external.

It's based around speed, and keeping the file size costs off me.

Aside: I wish LR would add some file management like Aperture's vaults...

eoren1 · June 30, 2008

My Example
So here is a typical (small) part of a weekend outing with the kids. This is the survey view of a crop of similar photos. At this point I have keyworded each shot and rated them (2 to 3 or X for rejected).

After deleting the rejected photos, we're left with:

One more (very difficult) culling run and we have the finalists:

You'll notice that only two are flagged as a 'pick' and those will be processed and posted to smugmug to share with family. The rest will be kept as a documentary of this moment in my girl's life. Do I need to keep all 16 photos for this purpose? I'm starting to think not and that a thorough culling is the more efficient and prudent course.

By the way, thank you for all of the responses. It really is fascinating to see the different approaches we all take.
E

tfitz · July 1, 2008

Just Curious

Miguel Delinquento wrote:

Like others here I can relate to your situation. I'm pushing 23K images in Lightroom over 4-5 years of shooting digital. i don't have the patience for a detailed star system. Mine are either 5-star wonders, picks for something worthy to investigate, and un-ranked that are good enough to provide history of an event in our lives.
I throw away about 35% of each card's images on average. Sometimes it is hard to know whether a shot will be valuable in the moment. Especially if your parents or loved ones are elderly and they live 3200 miles from your kids.
I have four internal hard drives in my Mac Pro and a 750G external backup drive, plus three smaller external drives. Storage is cheap and I stopped caring about that. What matters is proper organization and my ability to quickly get at the 5-stars stuff for art shows.

M

At what point does Lightroom begin to slowdown it's DB management in regards to the number of photos in it's database?

eoren1 · July 1, 2008

I don't think that the upper limit is known...at least for version 1. I've had other users tell me that 30k is 'nothing'. Hopefully, with version 2, Adobe will give some info on catalog size.
E

ps - welcome to dGrin!

staceyeid · July 1, 2008

Just my 2 cents and please keep in mind that I do not have kids and may change my tune if I ever do.

This past year my Nana and Papa passed away and we were left with shoe boxes full of their family photos. I'd say there was somewhere around 800 photos spanning their wedding up until a few years before their deaths (and even a few dozen or so photos from their individual childhoods).

Going through those photos with my Father and his sister was priceless. My Nana had written the date, names, locations, and sometimes even the mood on the back of most photos. It was a trip down memory lane for them and a chance for me to learn all kinds of cool things about my grandparents.

But, what made the experience enjoyable and not a task was the fact that only the best shots were saved. By best I do not mean perfect exposure, aperture, and lighting, I mean they truly captured the mood, location, and feeling of each setting.

All 5 kids lined up from youngest to oldest in front of the Christmas tree, Nana and the kids caught with their mouths wide open and their eyes crinkled up in the middle of a laugh while vacating on Lake Michigan.

There were very few repetitive photos. There were some vacations or holidays where there was only 1 shot, but that shot captured the essence of the event.

I guess what I'm trying to say in a very long winded way, is that there is something to be said for limiting the photos to the truly memorable.

When it comes time for someone to go through my electronic shoe box of photos, I don't want them to become bogged down with 30 shots of the same scene, instead I want to share the 1 or 2 photos that I can look at and immediately be transported back to the time and place the photo was taken.

Edited to add: Please, please, please remember to include key words or captions with your photos. I know the timestamp is taken care of for us in this digital age, but the captions my Nana wrote on her images are PRICELESS. I've included a few examples below, taken directly from the back of her photos.

"Mark is 3 years old today!"

"That's my honey, picking violets!!!"

Keep 'em all or delete a ton - what do you do?

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