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.