Rongnongno Loc: FL

Like many I am a digital pack rat but I have a flaw as far as pack rat goes, every so and then I 'clean' meaning I savagely cut on the clutter.

Between yesterday and this early afternoon I killed 5,395 pictures, some as old as 2004.

I use the criteria:
Old
No real interest (ordinary, out of the mill)
Poor workmanship (out of focus, under/over exposed)
Duplicates (too close to another more recent, especially flowers and insects)
Will never be used (pattern background shot during some unrelated event)

So, from over 29k in pictures and PSD files I went to just about 24k...

What would be YOUR criteria to clean up your own pictures?

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

My criteria is pretty much the same as yours. I look at photographs such as a mountain scene. If I can't identify it specifically to which mountain or why I took the photo, (I fished there with my kids, shot a deer there, camped there with a friend etc.) then I delete the photo. Like you I delete duplicates no matter what or who it is. I don't need 10 photos of my granddaughter riding her bicycle (though my wife does). If I have gotten into a certain aspect of photography and my first shots were terrible but started getting better I will delete my first terrible shots.

It is a tedious chore to delete photographs because I find myself not deleting but more looking at photos from long ago and trying to find a reason to keep them. I also like seeing old friends and places I had not thought of for a while. Normally some always go.

Dennis

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

Duplicates -
Survivors might enjoy looking at what we consider "ordinary" -

I know I enjoyed looking through the collection my dad had - it shows a little history of where he had been and what his interests were - - - just my thoughts...

Rongnongno Loc: FL

I cannot disagree with that but at the same time, how many of these pictures did you really keep?

As for me, no kids, so nothing to worry about. In any case I apply myself to leave as small a foot print as I can. In my will I have 'burn me, disperse whatever or give me to the dogs, it does not matter just no marker'.

AntonioReyna Loc: Los Angeles, California

I never delete images as it is very very cheap to store them on external hard drives.

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

We kept them all and my brother is scanning them when he has time. Dad not only had personal photos but a lot from WWII when he was a squadron leader in Italy (those we are turning over to the WWII archive folks after they are scanned).

We consider it family history and it's easy to keep in digital format - something to be enjoyed by the future generations...

Rongnongno Loc: FL

I do wish my own family (mother side) had this perspective as my great grand father was a photographer. While working he had documented the life in his area from the late 1890 to 1930. No one wanted the tons* of classified archives he had neatly preserved in his basement. No one, not the city not the local museum and not the regional was interested so it all went to dump in order to sell his house after my grand mother's death (1985). I learned of it too late.

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* Daguerreotype and glass negatives.

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

That's a shame but not everyone has the "big picture" perspective of maintaining history.

G Brown Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK

I take loads and cull as I download (I like to see them on a monitor 'just in case'.)
I name those that get worked on there and then and save the also ran thinking to pp later.
when I have a couple of months of photos on the hard drive I 'spring clean' all the old waiting for pp files (probably 3/4 go) and move everything left on to an external drive.
What's there stays.

The problem is that I don't use a single workflow so things like Light-room and Elements need to be updated regularly and I forget....frustrating when you feel creative and end up house-keeping

George

Rongnongno Loc: FL

My classification is simple and flawless:
1) Personal stuff - Date only. Year/month/ sometime day.
2) Professional stuff - Year - Name - month/day

I remember where I was at the time (been living abroad most of the time) so from this year to this year I was... There... I took pictures of the 'red piazza' at that period so it narrows down everything fast.

Trouble is that if want to find a specific name and have no idea of the period (it happens) I have to go back year by year, starting with the last known shoot.

On that aspect LR could be (and is for many) a life saver. I never was able to get a taste to that type of organization. One of my failings.

watchcow Loc: Moore, Oklahoma

I am entirely too cheap and disorganized to invest in a real digital catalog software package for myself. For institutions and businesses I support, I have recommended and installed Extensis Portfolio. This is not for people that regularly move computers or rename things, but for businesses or professionals that have invested in dedicated storage hardware like NAS or a PC with a RAID controller in it designated as a file server, then Portfolio makes finding stuff really easy if you load images through the catalog.

Since most of my images are made for other people I tend to be pretty selective about what I keep because that is also what I give to the client. That might be a third of the volume I have to keep backed up. most of it is collections of pictures and video clips my spousal unit insists I keep. Many of those get collected and given to the school my kids attend and they get used in the yearbooks and bulletin boards around the school. after each school year I look at those that were selected and then throw out a bunch of fluff that was not. Keeping pictures of my kids, I can see, keeping pictures of other peoples' kids seems like a liability. The way my wife goes about organizing images to share is annoying. I end up with duplicates scattered all over the place. so I have an old friend called "DupKiller" you can download for free to analyze all the drives and let me know where islands of duplicate files are. This at least helps control storage growth.

randomeyes Loc: wilds of b.c. canada

Been shooting digital for 9 years (film and slides for many years before that). I am savage when it comes to digital.

Any technical flaw (focus etc. )... gone.
Boring.... gone
Duplicate or near duplicate ... gone
Just plain don't like any more ..... gone


I keep one file called "the best" some times I add files, sometimes, after re examination after years, I subtract.

The main criteria is "if I don't like it " it goes.
Currently in my " best file" spanning the 9 years, I have just under 400 shots, any one of which I would put on here with no trepidation.

Be brutal, brutal, brutal. The best shot you are going to take is the next one!

watchcow Loc: Moore, Oklahoma

It's fun to see the criteria people post here. I figure i am pretty stringent about culling my own pictures, but with 3 small children, cats, dogs, and a wife, I don't get to throw out nearly as much as i would on my own. so i separate the collections at a pretty high level in my directory structure so the wife has a place for her stuff and i have a place for mine. if i separate the things i do for other people from the stuff i really shoot for myself, that drops my storage about 20 to 1.

These days storage is cheap. I caught an ad yesterday for hitachi 4tb drives for $119. hmmmmm... I make a point to collect all images on my "server" which is just a desktop PC in a "gamer" case so it has lots of drive bays and cooling fans. I have 3 hard drives in it tied to a special controller to create a RAID array. So if any one drive fails, it all stays up and nothing is lost. (server technology on a consumer level) If a drive does fail just replace it with a drive of equal or greater size and it will rebuild itself and restore the redundancy and the speed. this computer is the one i put my cloud backup software on. since i rarely delete anything i want to keep the cloud is purely a restore point, not secondary storage. if the PC is lost or blown away in a tornado (I *do* live in Moore, Oklahoma after all.) then i can get all of it back. Since the cloud service scrambles the data as it is uploaded, they are not storing my pictures, they are just storing bits so i have no worries about data theft.

We insure everything in our lives in America. An external drive of any size is over $100 and you have to act to get stuff backed up to it. It is just as prone to failure as any other hard drive. So why not spend $60 a year to back up your most important files? I personally chose Crashplan, but Carbonyte and Backblaze are good services with a track record and data centers located in more than one place in the US.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

Old I keep if it meets the "good" criteria

mikeysaling Loc: essex uk

I view images on the card and only save to disc the ones I wish to keep - certainly don't 'blanket' download from card to disc. Duplicate shots on the card I delete at this first review also those rubbish shots we all get (out of focus , bad exposure etc). When the remaining shots on each card are a bit unmanageable (say over 200) - I do an extra purge .