SANParks.org Forums

I am sorting through my pics from when I first started with digital photography. I am a hoarder and have kept 98% of my pics, even if there are 5 of exactly the same scene; and even if they are not good shots (which is the majority).

I am going to have to change this because as time passes, I am going to be using far to much disk space to save all my pics.

What do you guys do with regard to keeping and saving pics? Do you delete bad pics right away as you take them, or on the day you take them. Do you only sort through them once you are home and upload them. How many pics do you end up keeping. What is a good routine to develop and follow?

It must be really bad before I delete them.
A lot of times the pic is not of very good quality, but tells the right "story" and I will keep it.
Still have about 95% of all my pics.
All are stored on a seperate HD and burnt on CD rom.

Me too

I have a 500G hard drive that is primarily for photo storage, and the CD/DVD copies are an extra "security", because hard drives do fail The storage space required isn't really that much (takes up FAR less space than all my slides! ) and I'd rather keep more than later regret eliminating some. Guess I'm just an inveterate pack rat

Ditto here! Even bad photos bring back memories.

I have started keeping a separate file for really nice photos though. And I try to name the photos, while keeping the original file number intact to help to eliminate duplicates. eg 1000345 - kudu at Mpondo dam.

I had two recent experiences that have sobered me up in terms of just deleting pictures. I was about to delete a picture of a tree, lots of those in the Park.. I then looked more carefully and saw a Leopard underneath it.

I had already deleted a few pictures of a "grey dingus" because I had run out of memory on my camera. Chirinda later pointed out after I had posted it on the angels thread, that it was a juvenile saddlebill. Probably one of my rarest sightings.

I am now going to be a lot more careful about deleting in future.

I delete anything that's reasonably out of focus or has motion shake/blur. If I have several pics of the same scene I may delete some of them. I shoot in RAW+Jpeg so each shot takes up a lot of space.

I select the better shots from each set and promote (copied) them into a parent folder, with all the shots from the set in an 'All' folder.

I have a 300GB external which is more or less dedicated to photos (with a broken power brick at the moment), and theoretically I back up on to DVD.

I also usually carry at least 8-16GB of memory when I shoot.

I shoot RAW only and convert only the photos I want to post or e-mail to JPEG, for me taking in both formats is a waste of space.

I generally keep everything, photos I take of my dogs, EVERYTHING, as long as it is in focus and not a "crappy" shot.

I store it all on a few external Hard Drives I keep in my safe, don't want to count up how many GB's that ammounts to by now. On my way to by a 1.5TB HDD soon... Wedding Photos I keep on HDD AND on DVD's to back it up.

Keep every photo taken on the external drive as a backup and on the laptop the same, only once I have a picture that is better than another do I replace it on the laptop. A lot of the pics I have that take up space are the underwater ones...battle to get the perfect shot with these underwater dwellers , and then the animals well which does one delete, they all different and unique in their own way

I delete all images which are not sharp, severely under or overexposed or otherwise imperfect. This tends to be about 10% of my images which leaves me with a huge amount of images after a trip. On an average trip to I shoot between 2000 - 3000 images a week and if I stay in a National Park like KTP then I might shoot as many as 6000 images a week. What I do with these images is the following:

• During a trip in the daytime I download the files from my CF/SD to a portable harddrive
• In the evening I synchronise my portable storage device with another identical portable storage device so that I have a backup of my files. Both these portable storage devices contain 500GB SATA notebook harddrives and I have two 500GB harddrives in reserve in case I run out of harddrive space or in case of a hardware failure.
• When I get home one of the harddrives from my portable storage device goes into my vault and functions as a backup for my images.
• The content of the other (identical) harddrive is copied to an external harddrive which contains my entire photo library. This means my files are then on my external harddrive and on the harddrive which is in my vault. The harddrive from the portable storage device is formated and is reused during the next trip.
• I use Adobe Lightroom as catalogue for my images so I add all the images to the catalogue and add metadata for all the images (where was the image made, what does it show, ...). I also rate the images on a scale from 0 - 5 which can later be used for selections. At this point I also delete the files which are technically imperfect
• After adding metadata and rating the images I copy the new images and the metadata to another external harddrive which is essentially a backup of my image library. This is the third backup device.

I never use DVD's as I shoot too many pictures to store on DVD's. My entire archive is close to 2TB now....

M.

I also keep all, even the shots of the blue sky (check for dust on the sensor) if I forgot to delete it in the field.
In Lightroom I simply flag them as junk, usually the red flag, and set Lightroom not to show them. The bit of space they take isn't worth saving at the current prices. 1 TB for 60 euro...

The exported jpg's are a different story. One set, at 800x533, gets deleted as soon as they found their way to the servers I use. Another set, at 1920x1200, is looked at as if I'm thinking of entering them for a competition, and after the cull goes to a directory on C.
Those show in my screensaver, and on my desktop.

Sure, as long as you have a PC fast enough to show your RAW images quickly. Mine can't, so I use the JPGs for checking what I have, and I still have the RAW files if I need them

I only keep the best ones
Arrived back from my kruger/mapungubwe trip with roughly 600 images
Already deleted the unsharp, wrong exposed ones in the camera (10%)
On average i keep 40% of each trip
And 10% are the best ones which i use.

Only make jpegs when i need to use them

Statistics from my five day trip to Kruger last May:

Total number of images
2553

Number of images rejected at QC
302 (11,89%)

Number of images with top rating after QC
126 (4,94%)

Number of images used in website gallery
41 (1,61%)

As you see I only use a tiny fraction of the total amount of images which I shoot.

By the way, I always shoot in RAW and I don't store any other format. Exported TIFF of JPEG files are not something I need to store as I can always export them from my RAW conversion tool (Lightroom). These tools get better and better at processing RAW files, especially at controlling chroma and luminance noise, which means that with every new version of these tools the exported files look better.

I don't delete any of my pictures, even the out of focus ones!
As I do a lot of graphics more than once I have used out of focus, over and under exposed pictures for my back grounds.
Now shoot only in RAW format and convert to TIFF the ones I need to work with.

I tend to keep quite a fair amount of my pictures , probably almost all once i get back but if i have taken a picture and can see its not great delete it on the spot. But in kruger i generally take anything between 300-500 shots a day but after sorting them only use about 20-30 and dont delete the rest. Only problem is i shoot only in RAW and my new cameras RAW files are huge.