PetKal wrote:
If we apply the ultimate keeper criterion, i.e., images published and/or sold, or having a reasonable potential of becoming such, then I suspect most of us amateurs would be counting our keepers in the range of 0.001% or less.
You're tough on us
But probably right. I counted 3 out of 50K (1 newsprint, 1 paid portrait, 1 sold art print)
That makes 0.006%
If we accept as keepers "seen by more than 50 people" (pick any number you like), not including discussion fora, I land on 2% or 1000. More joy than testing and pixelogy
As a guess, I delete @ 25% right away upon uploading to Lightroom. Criteria.....oof, bad comps, just don't grab me....why the heck did I shoot that
As I work thru and process the rest, I'll invariably delete more, but much more selectively.....redundant shots, comps less appealing than the ultimate keepers.
All that said, I also back up after the original edit to 2 ext hdds.
One Christmas a while ago, my mother-in-law put together a family slide show of pictures she shot over a period of almost 50 years. She was famous for irritating the whole family by demanding people pose (often more than once to get it "right"). She shot all family events and sometimes just shot stuff. Many were OoF, badly exposed, people had odd expressions, etc. But it was priceless.
We spent two and a half hours of "Look, Grandpa had hair", or "God I loved that old car", "Look how small those trees were!", "Geeze Grandma, you were hot." "I remember that dress", and so on. It was one of the most interesting family times we have had in years. Old people talked about the old days, and the grandchildren learned about their history in really important ways.
So now I delete hardly anything family related.
The commercial stuff I edit ruthlessly, and deeply.
I go thru the images in lightroom, and give each one a rating (1-5 stars), those that are totally bad, I flag as rejected. Everyonce in a while, I just use the delete rejected images function to cleanup.
Its not just a matter of the images taking 30mb each, but the LR database gets giagantic as well.
I think it depends what you do with your images. Every since what would normally have been trash shot of Clinton hugging Lewinsky every PJ I know keeps everything. I bet the shooter made six figures on that shot.
I keep most all of them. I’m waiting for that magic software that will come out in the future that will take a OOF, poor exposure, crappy composition, ect…..and turn it into a masterpiece.
