cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I'd love to say that I keep 100% because they are all such great shots, but that's far from the truth. As a very busy photographer, my biggest problem with this is time, so I tend to keep more, rather than less as storage in fact IS cheap. I try to get rid of the real losers, but sometimes there just isn't time for that. To me it's similar to cutting out and throwing away negatives from losey shots, something I don't think many of us did! Whatever the case, since I copy every file to a second drive upon import, I can tell you those copies never get culled. Kind of like watching my car rust! Best of luck.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I'd love to say that I keep 100% because they are all such great shots, but that's far from the truth. As a very busy photographer, my biggest problem with this is time, so I tend to keep more, rather than less as storage in fact IS cheap. I try to get rid of the real losers, but sometimes there just isn't time for that. To me it's similar to cutting out and throwing away negatives from losey shots, something I don't think many of us did! Whatever the case, since I copy every file to a second drive upon import, I can tell you those copies never get culled. Kind of like watching my car rust! Best of luck.

Jim Plogger Loc: East Tennessee

All of my image files are downloaded to a folder under Pictures that I named "Storage Bin". The first thing that I do is preview each one in Bridge (select thumbnail, hit space bar). If it is out of focus (blurry) I delete it immediately. The rest, I open in ACR and play with processing. Any that I find unacceptable are also deleted. Keeping all of your images is, of course, a personal choice, but it is hard to justify keeping an image that can't be "fixed".

Bowpet Loc: Loveland, CO

Hard drives are so cheap these days, I would just get a 2 TB hard drive (under $100), or larger ones for a bit more, and fill it up, and then another one...

Yankeepapa6 Loc: New York City

Good luck moving forward. I am just the opposite. I delete almost immediately those I do not like.

RRS Loc: Not sure

Isn't it funny how we have changed. If we were still all shooting film we'd never shoot what we shoot today as far as volume is concerned. I look at my images and think will I ever want to come back to this and print it. I don't spray and pray either. I come back with say 20 good shots out of 50 of a grizzly and the guys next to me both shot over 500 each. On cold rainy days I'll start with a date and delete files that I may have missed. With family shots I find I will keep more. I learned a lot shooting weddings for over 25 years, you soon know what sells and what doesn't and I was shooting film for 95% of the time. Look on the bright side, someone will be very busy checking your files after you are gone.

jaycoffman Loc: San Diego

I first download all my pictures to PICTURES on my iMac creating a file for that trip/shoot. Then I download them to Lightroom where I go through them quickly and fully (PICTURES and Lightroom) delete the ones that are not critical to my picture story and are damaged one way or the other (focus, dof, etc.). This eliminates about 20 percent. Then I go through Lightroom again and tweek them and choose only the one or two shots from a series that best illustrates my story and is the best IQ. The others I delete only in Lightroom. At the end I have only my working pictures in Lightroom but have a permanent (?) backup in PICTURES which I backup on an external hard drive.

Having said that, I still have way too many pictures and am still looking for more ways to organize them. Good luck!

tommystrat Loc: Bigfork, Montana

That is precisely what I do - on the first go-round, if the image doesn't strike me emotionally, compositionally, lighting, focus, etc. as a potential "keeper" it is ditched. That gets rid of at least 80% of the images. I then revisit the remaining images in a day or so, and cull out the ones that passed first inspection but now seem flawed. That leaves 5-10% of the images actually saved. Then I will take the "best" ones for PP work. On a 500-image session, I will end up keeping maybe 5-10 shots and will can the rest. I can't count the number of times I went back to an image and wondered, "Why in the world did I keep that??" :-)

GEANNIE

Have learned to exam my photos with a very critical eye and delete photos that are sub par or that when I look at them I wonder why I even took the shot.

jmvaugh Loc: Albuquerque

Since I’m still learning I only download approximately 20% of what I shoot. I typically delete 60% of those and then might post process 1 or 2 of the final cut. Even with a crop sensor, because I still shoot RAW and jpeg, it takes a lot of space to store and manage those files. I keep most everything of family shots and I do far less deleting of vacation/bucket list shots.
In the past twenty years, I’ve never wished I didn’t delete that less than primo shot.

Dairygoat

Is there a tutorial about a way to do this? (the best way to do this)

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Absolutely not. I only keep those worth keeping that I would not mind showing. Even then after a year or so if I see no value I get rid of them deemed not worth keeping by me. I always filter the decision through the historical filter as well. I look at old family photos over 100 years old and use those as a guide for historical value.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

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I shoot many thousands of photos a year, one year alone shooting about 20,000 photos as I was shooting a lot of birds in flight. I always use the same approach when I return home. I download directly from the card, letting LR do the download and linking up of files. I begin to quickly go through the files in the Library Module, putting a reject "X" on anything that is blurry or just never going to make a good photo no matter what (bad composition, half a bird, my foot, etc.). This is only my first pass. I always have LR do a save on my files so I keep copies of all of my photos, even the bad one, on an external drive that is different from the external drive that I keep my main catalog and photo files in that catalog on. I delete thousands of photos every year. In fact, I don't actually delete enough photos since I do hate to toss anything that is sharp and COULD (unlikely) be used one day. Then I normally go back and mark "good" photos with a color and begin to process all "good" photos. I have about 60,000 photos in the main catalog, from when I started in 2010 until today. I would guess that I've tossed, this means Deleted From Disk, perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 photos over the entire time between 2010 and now. I do not keep any photos online in cloud-type storage, they are all on various external disks and copied in various places. The offline storage you refer to your post, having to do with LR, is, I think, actually having more to do with Adobe than a specific program, the program simply allows you to "get there" and could be any of their many programs, including LR. I am not sure what you mean by "archived." All of my 60,000+ photos are linked to the LR application and I work on and use them from within LR. I guess my "archives" would be the RAW image files that are backed up upon import.

cbw60

I delete all shots I consider bad. If I have two or more that are the same. One will get deleted.

Leitz Loc: Solms

I keep the ones I want to keep, and bin the ones I don't want to keep. Hope this helps make your decision easier.