To Delete or Not To Delete...

[isaiahbrink]

Me, I keep everything, from the original unedited file, to the edited version, all of them. Like Snarfy, I save them in psd and jpg formats, and not only use my internal hd, but 2 external's as well, and throw on there the fact that I also burn a dvd of my images about once a month.

Isaiah

[sandman]

I delete 80-90% of what I shoot, on average. Sometime more, sometimes less.

When I edit, I keep the originals untouched.

I use Carbonite for backup.

[Silverstangs]

I go thru all the images I take, delete the ones that are absolute junk, and then burn the rest to DVD.

[gdanmitchell]

I shoot a lot... and do not delete much. A few reasons...

Hard drive space is cheap. I now see 500GB internal drives for $100. I keep external drives for storage and they'll hold tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of images.

More than once I've "rediscovered" a photograph that I had overlooked when I first took it, and in several cases these have turned out to be wonderful shots. In fact, every year I spend some time intentionally browsing through all of the year's shots for just this reason.

It's not that I never delete anything, but I have to be absolutely positive that the photo is truly worthless before I do so.

Dan

[frankeleveld]

I often make a quick selection on my camera, deleting the images that went up wrong beyond fixing in PS.

I then import everything onto my Project HD of my Mac. I make folders for each import, named YYMMDD-sequence #-brief description of the session, which in practice resembles something like this 070626-1-Curacao.

There's an Edit folder on the HD as well, in which I put images I'm working on but with which I'm not fully satisfied. Mind I rarely do edit my images extensively, just a little curve-processing, sharpening and sometimes cropping. I rather prefer to bung my images through DxO instead. 95 out of 100 images come out great with just the Auto settings; with vivid, brilliant colors, fully corrected for lens distortion and vignetting (if desired, of course) and with added sharpness and contrast. And it has the advantage of batch processing - when having to process several hundreds of images I just put the software to work so when I'm awake, I'm usually in for a pleasant surprise how everything worked out :)

[Killjoy]

I don't delete a thing. I have them all. Just like Abel, I might be able to do something with that shot later.
Also, just a question from another view point. When you shot film (and some of us still do) did you throw away any negatives? Doubtful. Especially since they were attached to each other, and you may use that as an excuse, but you didn't throw them away, did you (that was more of a statement than a question).

[imported_JeromeL]

good point Alan, and i've definitely 'rediscovered" some older shots, but still, when i see shots that are just horrible in composition, or are multiples of overs, i have to get rid of them.