KerryF

[quote=RonDavis]

I have been doing where I kept all my pictures for the last 20 years and after my last trip where I took so many pictures, I wanted to see if there was a consensus of what everyone kept or that everyone does what is good for them. After reading everyone’s opinion, I will probably change a little in what pictures I keep.

jeffrey8066

AS many as it takes to tell the story of your vacation without boring the crap out of the people to share your photos with. Also a group of good phots that can be added at some point.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

The important thing isn't whether or not you bore the hell out of the people with whom you share your photographs, but whether or not they mean something to you. What you choose to keep because it has meaning to you and what you choose to share with others are two separate matters.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

Hogs this is a great discussion. There are no right or wrong answers but there are consequences from the choices we make.

ClarkJohnson Loc: Fort Myers, FL and Cohasset, MA

I have an entirely different “problem.” I am fine with culling down to the most interesting and technically excellent images. My portfolio from a 10-day trip to Japan was 20 images. However, I can never remember to capture pictures of place, i.e., where we stayed, the transportation vehicles, etc. Case in point: earlier this year, we were in Costa Rica, and I captured some wonderful shots of a Resplendent Quetzal. My wife turned her camera around a captured wonderful images of the hillside farmhouse that was our viewing station. Now, why did I not think of that?

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

I guess you are after technical excellence, while she has an artist’s eye.

steve49 Loc: massachusetts

I would add that shooting wildlife the exposures add up quickly..as do the misses.
My mist typical vacation is around 2 weeks. I usually shoot maybe 1500 shots.. I try to narrow it down
To around 100 and put those up on smugmug so I can send out a link. Mostly landscapes and general
Interest photos.
Shooting birds especially I can easily take 500- more in an hour. The miss rate is high though cause of the nature of it.
In these Groups my delete rate is easily 90%. Again I'll save the keepers to smugmug, consign the rest to oblivion.
I also from time to time go back to older files and sharpen the pencil by taking out older stuff that no longer
Fills the bill or has been superseeded by more current work. I can't think of any reason to hold onto terabytes of
Old photos.

kybob Loc: Versailles, Kentucky

When I read this I thought ok did I have a senior moment and write this? And now cannot remember doing it. Has dementia set in? I do the exact same thing, down to my wife helping / doing the Shutterfly book. I have kept every photo and have 3 (20) terabyte NAS units set to mirror each other, remember backup in threes, why I do not know I cannot hit the delete button. It is fun to go back to photos taken years and years ago and re-edit with the new software we have today. The other day I fiddled with a photo I had taken with a D100 ran it through the latest version of Lightroom it was amazing the difference in the original edit I had done so long ago. It was also a great trip down memory lane of that trip and made wonder, dam where has the time gone. When we went on that trip it was just our 3rd cruise and we thought we were on top of the world, wondering if we would ever take another to such a far away place. It gave us our desire to want to see the world. Sorry ramblings of and old man. The moral of the story is it was fun to go back through all the thousands of photos I took and relook through them some that I must have thought were not good today I was like wow why did I not pick that one. That is why I keep every shot.

Dannj

What should I keep? About 10-20%
What do I keep? All of them
I’m just really bad at culling😢

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Ditto.
I'm selective in what I shoot.

photoman43

My answer is "It all depends and it varies from trip to trip." There is no single right answer.

For a unique location like Antarctica I would be taking a lot of images and multiples of key scenes with possible minor changes for f stops, shutter speeds, zoom length and exposure tweaking. Once home and after downloading, I would delete just the obvious bad images. I keep almost all of the similar images for about a year as one version might be better than another for a particular situation.

For another trip with just record images of where I was, I keep just enough good ones to record where I was. I do not keep similar images of the same scenes.

josquin1 Loc: Massachusetts

It's possible the answer could be take fewer but more careful photographs.

Dr. Joel Germond Loc: California Central Coast

I take mostly wildlife photos. I might take fifteen shots of a particular bird because it is there. Likely this will be pared down to one or two shots during post production before being sorted into a folder for easy retrieval. On the one to five stars system five stars is something I am proud enough to show, print or sell. Four stars is a maybe usable. Three stars is "for information only" such as a bird that I have not yet gotten a good picture of yet. Ones and twos are clutter and out they go. I use Adobe LightRoom for post production.

Latsok Loc: Recently moved to Washington State.

[quote=KerryF]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!!!. 😜😜😜

David in Dallas Loc: Dallas, Texas, USA

Yep. I actually have 2 "share" groups I work toward: what I put to Flickr is both what I want to keep and what I will share with the general public; what I select from Flickr to post on UHH is a much more limited set.