In this digital age of photography, it is cheap to take a lot of photos. People often comment amongst family and friend. I came back from my holiday with 2000+ photos. That does not really imply that you have 2000 amazing photos. The truth is probably 50-60% will be keepers the rest get deleted straight away.
But this doesn’t happen very often. Myself included. You take lots of photos, you come back and download them on your computer consuming a few Gigs of space. However we never spend the time to tidy up and delete unwanted photos or bad shots.
I have been making a habit of reviewing all my photos and critiquing them quite harshly. Deleting shots which don’t impress me.
1. Bad composition – Delete
2. Bad lighting – can it be fixed using Lightroom and Photoshop? Will it become a keeper after the effort. No? – Delete
3. Bracketed Photos – once you post process these into a well exposed shot or HDR, you don’t need all the bracketed photo files. – Delete
4. Panoramic series – shooting a panoramic photo you may take from 3-18 or more shots. Once you create your final Panoramic shot in post processing, do you really need the individual shots? – Delete
5. Blur – on some rare occasions blurry shots can turn out nice by accident of course. All the bad ones – Delete
The end result is not to save disk space, we all know its relatively inexpensive. The whole purpose of this exercise is to end up with a collection of photos that you like and others will appreciate. It often helps to go back to you library again after sometime and do a second or third pass of removing bad shots.
The more good photos you have in your library better your skill is portrayed to your audience. You don’t want to show people photos where you have stuffed up, do you?
So make a habit of deleting any unwanted and uneccessary photos from your photo library.
