You are assuming that they would understand the meaning of "similar". One young man commented on the "old fashioned words" that I use in my conversation that "no one uses anymore" and that he had never heard of before. After I assured him that I wasn't making them up myself and that I still believed that I was more than a nobody; I asked him why when he was fortunate to be born with direct access to the richest language on Earth with a vast palette of meaning, colour and nuance he insisted upon using the equivalent of a pre-school paintbox of primary colour? I'm still awaiting an intelligible answer.

So I recently went to Bueno Aires and Antarctica and I took a total of 6700 pictures. My first step to get to a managable number of pictures before I start editing, is to get rid of all of the bad/unuseable pictures (pictures of my feet, of the sky, trying something new that didn't work out, etc.). So that got it down to 6500 pictures. Then I start flagging the ones that I really liked and those that had potential but would need a lot of editing and that got the number down to 850. I then started editing the pictures as needed and there would be some that, for my level of editing with Lightroom, just didn't workout or pictures that were very similar to other pictures, and the bottom line is that I got the number down to 650 pictures that I uploaded to Shutterfly. Then my wife got involved to start putting them into a photo book and the final number of pictures that made it was 550 pictures.

So the actual question is, what number of pictures would you keep on your hard drive: all of them (6500), just the ones that you edited (850), or just the ones you uploaded?


Awesome question and description. I had (still have) the same problem and question after returning from the same trip (Chile/Antarctica/Argentina). I am still grappling with what I should keep out of the hundreds of photographs that I kept after the initial purges. Many are very similar, with perhaps a bit of a different cloud/fog shadows, some are horizontal vs vertical (where I like them both), others are just snapshots that are associated with some memory of my surroundings at the time, and some are fillers for transition points for potential powerpoint or slide show presentation I may/may not do on that memorable trip. But ...... there are so many of them. HELP!!!. 😜😜😜