Sunday
Jan062008
When I Delete a Photo
Sunday, January 6, 2008 at 11:02AM
Jim Correia asked a great question in a comment to my last post that I thought deserved a wider airing:
My answer is that I very rarely delete images these days. Just yesterday, a colleague at school emailed me asking if I had a photo of a particular child in our recent Christmas play. I only had one image of that child, and I had marked it as a reject. It wasn't a great shot at all - in fact, it was pretty terrible - but it was better than no shot at all. No shot at all was exactly what I would have had if I were in the business of deleting rejects straight away.
Hard drives are insanely large and cheap these days. I recently bought a 1TB SATA drive for about £180. All my master files put together total 170GB so, even at current capacities, I have some room to grow. I recently read that 4TB drives are on the horizon for around 2012, so I'm not worried that I'm out-shooting the rate of growth of storage.
I've developed a few rules for deleting or not deleting masters:
So my rule is basically "don't delete" unless I'd be keeping around a ton of rejects alongside two or three good shots in a project. Recall that my criteria for marking a photo as a reject is that there's something photographically wrong with it, so I'm not usually marking a huge number of shots as reject. What I usually end up with is a lot of poorly-composed One Star shots. I keep all of those because they're good to learn from - particularly if I'm making a repeat visit somewhere.
As to the question of when I would delete images, the answer is "not for a long time". Maybe six months or so.
2007 was my heaviest year of shooting ever. I haven't looked at the number of images I've kept, or the amount of data that it's eating. That would be an interesting post for later.
What are the criteria, and when do you delete masters? Only rejects? Immediately?
My answer is that I very rarely delete images these days. Just yesterday, a colleague at school emailed me asking if I had a photo of a particular child in our recent Christmas play. I only had one image of that child, and I had marked it as a reject. It wasn't a great shot at all - in fact, it was pretty terrible - but it was better than no shot at all. No shot at all was exactly what I would have had if I were in the business of deleting rejects straight away.
Hard drives are insanely large and cheap these days. I recently bought a 1TB SATA drive for about £180. All my master files put together total 170GB so, even at current capacities, I have some room to grow. I recently read that 4TB drives are on the horizon for around 2012, so I'm not worried that I'm out-shooting the rate of growth of storage.
I've developed a few rules for deleting or not deleting masters:
- If it's a one-off event, I'll keep every single shot. This includes things like Christmases, Birthdays, events, holidays and special trips.
- If it's something that's easy to repeat, such as a shoot of a local landmark that's (a) unlikely to change quickly and (b) likely somewhere I'll go frequently, I'll probably delete my rejects if they make up a high proportion of the project.
- If it's something like a trip to the park with the kids, I might delete the rejects but I'm not really keen to do that since even bad photos of your kids are good memories.
So my rule is basically "don't delete" unless I'd be keeping around a ton of rejects alongside two or three good shots in a project. Recall that my criteria for marking a photo as a reject is that there's something photographically wrong with it, so I'm not usually marking a huge number of shots as reject. What I usually end up with is a lot of poorly-composed One Star shots. I keep all of those because they're good to learn from - particularly if I'm making a repeat visit somewhere.
As to the question of when I would delete images, the answer is "not for a long time". Maybe six months or so.
2007 was my heaviest year of shooting ever. I haven't looked at the number of images I've kept, or the amount of data that it's eating. That would be an interesting post for later.
Reader Comments (5)
I was wrestling with this question earlier, and decided to tend on the ruthless side and delete most marginal images...
Looking forward to the next post on tagging.
I'm somewhat torn on this subject. I've recently started to become more serious so I haven't really found my way of doing it yet. My problem is that my main machine is a MBP which needs to contain a lot more than my photos and if I started to save all photos then it would probably be full by now. On the other hand I had a person before Christmas desperately seeking for pictures of her in a certain situation but I had deleted all of them since they in my opinion wasn't that good (they would have probably solved her problem).
Need to figure out how to handle this.
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