recently, i was discussing with a friend who like me takes a lot of pictures, and we touched on the problem that with digital photography, we have increased the problem of sorting out good from bad pictures tremendously.

since taking pictures with digital cams is so easy and cheap, i end up with several thousand pics per year on my hard drive, and it's increasingly difficult to find those which are actually worth looking at. i know about picasa and other cataloging software, but they can only help so much - they don't solve the problem of rating your pictures.

my friend (who also takes thousands of pictures as like me is no professional) said that he only throws away approx. 20% of his pics, 80% he keeps. for me, it's more the other way round - 20% i keep, 80% i throw away... but it's HARD, HARD, HARD work and time consuming, too.

what's your ratio between the good and the bad? and how do you handle it?

adobe lightroom lets you " rate " images as well as many other cataloging options.

editing is one of the hardest parts of this. a subject a lot of people overlook.

i'd say my ratio changes from shoot to shoot so its hard to say. sometimes i love everything sometimes i trash everything.

the first thing I do when I download from the camera is rate the images and throw away the poor ones. Sometimes I keep a few extra in case the person I'm photographing might prefer a different image then the ones I like. That way, i never have to look at the weak pictures twice.

Then, when I go to make a blog post, I select a subset, which I put in a folder within that day's pictures, which I label 'best'. And then I store them on an external hard drive and never look back - more pictures to take. I burn a cd for the person I photographed, usually. that's a secondary backup. If my external hard drive crashed, I guess I'd lose this first phase of my photo life - really my education. It wouldn't be the end of the world, though, and it is nice to have them on the blog as a final backup.



One thing I think I ought to do as a project one of these days: Go back through the blog, select about 50 favorites, get the full size files of those, and burn a couple of cd copies of them. that would be the true backup.


which makes me think of the best idea yet:
I'm going to create an action in the adobe actions palette called 'favorites' that saves a full size copy to a file called 'favorites' on my desktop, and then I've got the selection right there to burn to disk every now and then.

Thanks for posting this question. It got me thinking.

And the ratio - it is gradually shrinking. Slowly, I'm becoming more conscious, less of a 'snapper'.

Most of my pictures are really good! I don't have that problem.
Maybe you take too many pictures, mate? Quality over quantity, I say.