I seldom keep more than 50-60% of the photos I take. There’s no reason to waste my disk space with digital trash. It’s funny, the more photos I shoot, the less of them I keep. Lately, only about 10-20% of my photos manage to survive deletion. It’s an inversely proportional relationship.
When I decided to share my photos online, I whittled down my collection of over 18,000 photos (already winnowed) to about 7,000 that I wanted to upload. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been winnowing even those photos. I was a little too enthusiastic at first, and uploaded some photos that should have stayed on my computer or gone straight to the trash bin because they missed my initial winnowing. It’s been a painful process, and it’s very bruising to the ego, but it’s got to be done. It’s really hard to delete a photo when it’s had 10, 20, 30, even 50 or 60 views, but if it’s inferior, there’s no reason to let it stay.
I’ve reached a point now where I’m sharing thousands of photos (over 3,500 are public, with a total number of over 5,800), so there’s no reason not to winnow. If someone’s going to take the time to go through my photos, I don’t want them to see chaff, I want them to see substance. I know I’m sick of chaff. With time, my eye has gotten better at spotting good photos. And it’s also gotten more sensitive and easily disgusted with crappy snapshots that don’t deserve to waste disk space. I see so many of those when I hunt for good photos, that I can’t stand to see any in my own collection.
If you’ve been looking at my photos, and wondering how it’s possible that the total number of photos stays constant and even goes down while I upload new photos every day, now you have your answer. If you’re an experienced photographer, and you’ve seen some photos in my collection that you think are terrible, let me know. I’ll have a look and gladly delete any inferior photograph.
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Raoul Pop 
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Hi Taavi, thanks for your comments. I would caution you to do two things:
– Don’t depend on a photo’s views to gauge its quality. I often find that my inferior photos get more views, because most people don’t know any better. They need to be told what’s good. So if you know, deep down, that a photo deserves to be kept, but it just hasn’t gotten enough views, keep it anyway.
– Back up your photos! You have to do that! Write them to a CD or a DVD, it’s not that hard. You’ll be thankful you did!
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I too can’t stand to see any bad photos in my stream. I constantly delete bad shots. That’s what this SmartSet is for. I give you guys a chance to save some shots by viewing or faving them – so even if I personally don’t like some photo, I know I don’t have to delete it as somebody else likes it.
Luckily I’m too young to have kids, so I don’t have to take too many family snapshots. Hopefully by the time I do have kids of my own, I’ll be good enough that I can shoot every family photo with a “fine art” aspect to it. I just can’t stand to see boring family shots in my photostream, that only serve a historical purpose for me and my family.
My survival rate is currently about 20%. I don’t store any photos that I’ve uploaded to Zooomr (so please, Zooomr, don’t crash). I will start storing when I buy a dSLR or a new hardrive, whatever comes first.
Wow, it’s indeed really easy to start rambling about this subject. Better finish now.
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Tom: I stand impressed! I’m glad you’ve found a workflow that does the job! I agree, with the number of photos that you take, it must be difficult to find the time to winnow, so saving them and coming back later is the way to do it. Time has become critical for me as well. I’m still winnowing and editing photos I took at Disney World back in December, an I’ve got over a thousand older photos that Ligia took precious of her time to scan that I still need to organize and post-process. I worry about having too large of a collection though, because hard drives are apt to fail. What if I store my photos on a hard drive, put it in the closet, then come back to it 6 months or a year later, only to find out it’s kaput? And DVDs are still so small, size-wise, that I’m not that advantageous to store to them.
Jake: I agree, representative photos must be kept even if they’re not that good. I am doing that. But I don’t upload those inferior photos to Zooomr. They stay on my hard drive. That’s why I have a 2-phase winnowing process.
Nige: I’ve seen the thumbnails of your private photos, so I realized you were doing that. In the Welcome Mat section, there’s a link for Your Circle’s Recent Photos, and I use that all the time to keep up with the photos that the people in my circle are uploading. The thumbnails show up in there but when I click on them, the photos are unavailable. I was actually doing the same thing a while back. I’ve got a whole bunch of Private photos in my account still. And I would edit them online, then make them Public or available to Friends and Family. But I found out that I simply wasn’t getting the usual views on my Public photos. By the time I’d make them public, their place in the photo timeline had gotten old, and they wouldn’t display in the Discover:Photos and Discover:Geotagged sections anymore. Basically, people didn’t even know I’d uploaded new photos, and wouldn’t view them. And it’s no fun when people don’t see your photos, after all, you share them so they can be viewed. So I stopped doing that. As for your other comment, about keeping the inferior ones private, I can’t do that. It bothers me to see bad photos in my account, period. I’ve always been a little obsessive/compulsive, so maybe this has to do with that. At any rate, I’m winnowing my Zooomr photos, and that’s that. 😀
Thank you all for commenting! Really appreciate it!
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i’ve started to upload a few more pics onto my Zooomr account recently, and this is an issue that i have also considered, although my uploaded photo’s are nowhere near the numbers that you guys have posted!
those pics that i don’t wish to show publicly I have locked as “private”. perhaps this is an option for you, Raoul, and perhaps even for you, Tom? this way, you can show the community only those pics that you wish to show, whilst maintaining your numbers, without a cull. i’ve found that using juploader makes this process easy – now i upload all of my photo’s as private, and just change the status of those i wish to show the World!
just a thought – hope you both find a workflow that works for you.
Nige
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See, I don’t like the idea of deleting photos that you just don’t like (unless they’re just clearly trash photos). I’d rather see better organization/tagging/collections/whatever.
Tom has a metric ton of photos, as do you. I’m just starting out with photography and have already collected several thousand images this year alone without really trying. I’ve also started scanning old family photos to be able to do fun compilation/comparison stuff.
My question is – when we look back in 10-20 years at our collections, are we going to enjoy looking at the 12 different version of grandpa holding the new baby? Or mom kissing brother on the cheek while brother rolls his eyes? I have a feeling that one photo of that moment isn’t going to satisfy like 3 or 5 or 10 might.
Then there’s the whole question of relying on our own memories to fill in blanks where the photos leave off. My parents took very few photos of me growing up, so in some ways I’d like to ensure that I get plenty of my child. But, I don’t want to rob her of her own memories (and their evolution over time) either.
Sorry, it’s late, I’m wired, and apparently have time for philosophical discussion… 🙂
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Yeah, I’ve got kind of the same problem of course, with over 9,000 photos on Zooomr. Recently I deleted a bunch of dupes that ended up in there when I was bulk uploading. Still I tend to go for collections. Like I’m trying to create the largest collection of personally shot neon signs in the world. Or I just uploaded 60 or so shots of Mountain View Cemetery the other day and will probably still add hundreds more.
At present (I just did a count) I’ve got 177,918 digital images that I’ve taken stored on my hard drives. Of this 28,135 are of family members. I’d consider these snapshots. Most are not that good.
Another 12,113 I lump into the “fine art” catagory (whatever that means). These are processed images that I’m at least somewhat happy with. Of these, a little over 9,000 are posted to Zooomr.
The remaining 137,670 are sitting in folders organized by day on what I call my scratch drives. These are photos that I process from. Every so often I’ll cull some of these out, but by and large 80% of this content is content exactly as I shot it in my cameras.
My goal is to have at least 100,000 fine art shots before I die, all online.
I’m sure I’ll have well over 1 million scratch unprocessed images.
I don’t cull as much as I should from my scratch drives because it takes time and time is more valuable to me at this point than hard drive space.
Most of my finished fine art shots are really raw material for something that I’m hoping to create much later in life. I’d like to print out 8×10’s of all of certain themes, neon signs, advertising, cemeteries, portraits, miniature toys, whatever… and then plaster these shots over every visible inch of a gallery. So that when you walk in a door into a room with no windows every inch, all walls, ceiling, even the floor, beneath a plastic or glass surface become one giant collage. The more photos and the bigger the room the better. The photos would be on plywood which could then be sold as individual art pieces once the show was over.
This may never happen of course.
But whatever the case Raoul, I’m glad you’ve caught the photography bug as well and I love your massive and growing collection, even if it shrinks from time to time from your culling.
Tom
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