Culling/Archiving

[Ricco]

I'm curious as to what photos you keep?

Before I got my sony, I practically kept EVERY photo I took and it worked out quite well.

Now I take multiple shots of the same subject...as many as 20, under different settings (F/stop/speed/ISO) to see how it would look. Y'know, still getting to know my camera.
As you can imagine, my folders have gotten to be unwieldy.

Organization isn't an issue, I sort by year>month>date and then tag each photo with a variety of tags, but looking at these multiple shots I often wonder if I should just keep the best (IMO) or keep them for posterity.

I wouldn't mind knowing how you cull and archive your collections as well. I'm already looking ahead at getting another 2TB My Book.

[r0xikat]

I've been lazy about transferring all my stuff (mostly pics) from my 500GB to my 2TB that I bought last Christmas, but I have a relatively new laptop with a big-ish HD, so no need to rush. it needs to happen at some point this year, though.

I'd like to archive them all online once I get a site going; most of them are on facebook for now.

as for culling, if I never edit it the first go around, chances are I will never come back to it. I delete the RAW file (and its corresponding JPG/png, if it's been processed). if you have a number of shots of the same subject with different exposures/angles/etc, you will probably pick the most pleasing of the bunch when you edit them the first time.

[Angelo]

Anything I know I'm not going to use, I dump.
On duplicates I check for focusing accuracies. I keep the ones that are best or that have possibilities.
Sometimes it's a tough call whether to dump or keep - those I keep.

[Tom]

I catalog things by subject, then by date, then by event

So
<Travel Folder>
<2011 Folder> next to <2010> Next to <2009>
<0612-Location> [MMDD-Event - RAW files are kept here]
<Full-Res JPEGS><Web Res JPEGS> (each is a subfolder among the RAWs.


I delete all out takes.

[Buddha]

If they aren't out of focus, I keep them all since storage space is easy to come by. If I can't do a good job of editing today, I may be able to do better next month or next year. The old RAW files, the digital negatives, give me something to train on and learn on. If the only editing I ever did was on the 'good' ones, my editing skills would have much more room for improvement than they do. Like it or not, that is a necessary part of photography.

[Bruce M. Morris]

Originally Posted by r0xikat

I'd like to archive them all online once I get a site going; most of them are on facebook for now..

CJ, you know that FB compresses images when they upload them, right? Unless things have changed, the FB photoalbums are great for showing and viewing images but you cant use them for printing or editing after that.

[nameBrandon]

LR makes it's pretty easy to cull.. When I review each sessions' photos, I'll go through and do an initial pass, and separate images into flagged, nothing, or rejected. (kb shortcuts! x=rejected, p="pick" or "flag").

Then depending on if there were a lot of rejects or not, I'll either just leave them as rejected, or go through the LR option of deleting all rejected images in that folder from the disk. This automatically removes them from the catalog and the drive, so they're completely gone.

If I leave them as rejected, chances are 4-5 months down the road, when I'm cleaning up or need disk space, I'll have LR again go through and find all rejected photos that haven't been deleted and get rid of them.

Also, as far as the keepers, I would never, ever delete the raw file. That's the 100% original image that will never change. As long as you have the raw file, anything is possible. Once you've lost that, you've lost the actual sensor data, and you're stuck with copies of copies..

I process the raw file in LR. Export and edit in PS, then save the final image as full-size HQ .jpg, and re-sized .jpg (1200px on the longest side). Then I upload the full-size to my website / flickr, then use the 1200px version for facebook.