How Ruthless Are You?

[PhotoStory]

I'm just sat here working on my Aperture library, making alterations to my naming and filing structure, but I'm mainly reviewing my photographs and getting rid of those that I'm not happy with, which could be due to one of many reasons, but predominantly it's either the exposure, focus/sharpness, composition or having too many versions of the same subject and moment; doing this has got me thinking about how I review and process my photographs when I've been shooting and I'm trying to come up with a workflow and rating convention, so that when I upload some photographs in the future I will have a method to my madness.
When I'm out with my camera I don't chimp after every frame, but I do review my photos every so often and I'll take this opportunity to delete those which are just plain wrong or repetitive. When I return home, I'll upload all of my photos to Aperture and then depending on the nature of the subject or event, I'll proceed to skim through the lot and delete those that aren't right on closer inspection or temporarily reject those that could show some potential in the future when I review them again at a later date. For family events I try to keep as many photos as possible, I find the sentimental value is of more importance than the technical and artistic value.
Sitting here I think I could be slightly more ruthless with how I manage my photos, if I come away from a shoot with one or two really good photos then I'm very happy with that, but I do find I hold on to many photos just out of a fear of deleting and losing them forever.
So, how do you manage your photos and how ruthless are you, do images have to be perfect for you to keep them?

[colin C]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

There used to be a convention that being digital, you keep everything because storage is cheap.

I found that was OK, until you start to hunt for a picture and had to wade through all the dross to find it, so now I am fairly merciless with my culling. Technically wrong, out of focus, no real merit, unnecessary duplicates, no improvement over what I already have and out it goes. For any shots where I am undecided, I keep it in RAW but delete the JPG.

My workflow is:

• Upload and delete any obvious tat.
• Go through DPP and have another delete session and carefully look through duplicates to get rid of more.
• After converting to JPG's, set up a slide show and cull more.
• Go through slide show again for a final cull.
• While all the above is happening I am rating the good stuff, so that all of my 4 and 5 star.
• Family shots do not go through the above regime and only the rubbish is deleted.

Hundreds of shots get reduced to tens of shots and I have a manageable archive of work.

[MX5]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

There used to be a convention that being digital, you keep everything because storage is cheap.

I found that was OK, until you start to hunt for a picture and had to wade through all the dross to find it, ...

Yes, I agree ... I'm just changing things after repeated trouble finding images ... So my new workflow will have a two-phase-tidy ... rubbish goes into a digital waste bin where it resides for n months [not decided what n is yet] ... and then it gets expunged. Backups are sync'd so expunged files will disappear from the copies as well.

[Longshot]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

30 years ago in the days of film a keen amateur said sort and dump when your prints come back, advice ignored. On moving to Canada we had too, it took hours and I had to be ruthless. Colin/MX5 advice on digital very sound.

[colin C]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

Unfortunately, there isn't a Photo Fairy that rescues all of your dodgy shots, so that after a reasonable period of time, all of these treasures miraculously appear. On that basis, you have to be honest with yourself and get rid of anything unworthy at the first opportunity and not allow it to clog up your system.

In the days of film, we had to wait two weeks to be disappointed ................. with digital we have instant disappointment.

[DeeGee]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

Check on the camera and get rig of the obvious failures.

Load to computer and move into infrafiew which will slideshow raw images.

Go through, delete the rubbish, off focus or 'i can't do anything with that shots' .

On repetative shots I tend to go back and forth, a sort of that is better than that, that is worse than that mantra till I weedle down to what I think is worth keeping.

I'm not that good that I rate them or tag them. If something is from something particular such as a family party I tend to add a name onto the photo file so it goes : date/name of event or place if that makes sense.

[AndyA]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

I am terrible at organizing my images, I have multiple versions scattered all over my desktop, raws and jpegs in 'my pictures' folder etc etc. I really do need to get a grip of this! Is there any recommended software to make things easier?

[2Beers]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

try lightroom 5 beta as its what lightroom does best is organise photos

[AndyA]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

Thanks 2Beers, does it actually move images around into folders too?

[PhotoStory]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

I use Aperture Andy, it's similar to Lightroom in that it's a combination of a library with editing tools, not as advanced as Photoshop but it has everything I will ever need, including the ability to clone parts of the image in/out, that said in hindsight I would have got Lightroom, after watching some videos on Youtube it appears to have a lot more features, including graduated filters and lens correction presets, which Aperture doesn't have.

[2Beers]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

I use Lightroom to put my uploads from my camera/card into folders by year/month/date taken but I know it can do much more I just don't know how to do it yet

[AlexR!]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

I think I'm comparatively ruthless.
During the day, if I get a spare few minutes I tend to run through the shots in camera to get rid of the obvious bad 'uns.
I import straight into PSE Organiser and run through them with a fairly heavy cull. The definite keepers I put through ACR and PSE Editor to create a JPG, stacked with the RAW in Organiser. If I know I'm going to upload to Flickr I resize and save to a specific 'upload' folder, renaming to something descriptive, but not saving in Organiser. I then have another look through those I haven't bothered editing and ask myself why. This usually (but not always) results in me deleting them. As others have said, I am not as stringent on family images. I used to tag family members within Organiser but haven't done so recently as I've only recently upgraded to PSE 11 with its face recognition thingy and haven't decided how to play it yet. I don't do any rating, wouldn't have a clue how to come up with a system for that.
As to file structures, I have a main folder for each year, and within these PSE creates a new sub-folder for each upload.

[Muscat]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

I download all the images from a days shooting into a folder on my PC, I set up a structure that works for me which is basically year/subject (such as Family or Water drop) then I will create sub folders for further control such as date. Having downloaded everything, I don't delete images in camera, I will import everything into Lightroom and give the import generic names to help identify things.

once in LR I will view all images and use the delete from disk option to get rid of the obvious rubbish, I then go though the images again using the full screen view to eliminate the soft focus and duplicates again removing them from disk. I also add to individual images more meaningful tags in LR to help find files in the future.

Those that I keep I either process immediately starting in LR and dropping into photoshop and Topaz as necessary. If working only in LR I only keep the RAW file and the LR associated file, if I have done work in one of the other programs depending on what and how much I have done I will either keep a duplicate file in tiff or jpg format.

LR generates a backup on a regular basis and I also regularly backup my files from one internal disk to a second and then to an external hard disk to try and give me some resilience should I have a disk / system failure. I keep on my main system only a couple of years worth of images with older files being archived to a second PC and external disks.

when I get the urge I will review a selected group of images and have another purge of what now seems to be rubbish or delete images that have not been worked on.

I may not be as ruthless as Colin C but I do tend to reduce the hundreds down to multiple tens and keep things more manageable.

[Paulstw]

Re: How Ruthless Are You?

Having a 7D you tend to fill cards up quick and in the couple of months I've had it I've filled a 32Gb card 4 times.
I delete in camera zooming in to critical areas of focus, and trash the ones that don't make the cut.

I use EOS utility to import my pics.
I stopped using LR all together because its actually pretty system hungry and DPP coupled with PS CS6 does a better job.
I go back to old folders from time to time and delete things I think i'll never use.

Any exported JPGS get resized for Flickr and I have some TIFF files. All finished pics get transferred to Dropbox for storage.
That way I can get to them anytime I need them.