After decades of digital photography it's "time to clean house". How do you decide what to keep? Not a professional, don't bother posting to Getty or Shutterstock anymore, might enter some photocontest for the heck of it. But mainly we go on a trip and I do a "trip video" 10-20mins for us. Then I will cut it down to 3-7mins for the website and Youtube. Lastly take maybe the best 10-15 images (out of hundreds if not thousands taken on a trip) and upload them to the Stills section of our website. I think I need to get back to "is this wall worthy"....

Your process????

I don't trim down by that much, but I'll throw all the obviously out of focus stuff, missed subject, accidental triggers etc and keep what's sharp and half-way well composed as Raw files and keep them in site specific folders. I'll also throw duplicates if I have lots of near identical shots. Process the selects to tiffs and jpegs to master folders . Eventually they make their way to my website where they are subject or trip organized. Nothing particularly scientific, but it keeps the storage requirements reasonable. My images library probably takes up about 2.5-3 TB in various folders. I have 4TB SSD storage drive and a conventional 4TB backup in an enclosure. It enough to keep 30+ years of images. I lost some scanned images quite a few years back during the process of upgrading PCs as far as I can tell, but the last 25-30 years worth of images are still there.

My thoughts are that is the storage requirements are reasonable and it's organised enough to find an image with just a few minutes searching this is enough.

Your process seems pretty good. I would think trying to be ruthless at the front end of editing is the key to not being overloaded with rubbish. Your website looks great, by the way.

Like Chris I toss out the clearly bad, out-of-focus, poorly composed or lighted images. I’ll keep a bad image if it’s a record shot of something I haven’t seen. I try to winnow down near duplicates, too. I use Lightroom storage, and images and videos are filed in folders by date, and key-worded by location and subject.

I still have not tackled decades of film and slides. Sigh. One day.

I reckon I take 80-100 images on a dive. Yep, after 25+ years, super ruthless. If it’s not a 3-4 star, it’s a delete. That probably gets down to 30-40% of the trip’s images.

I usually do a second review about 72 hours after that cull and another batch will go to digital Valhalla. I now aim to end up with maybe 15-20images from a dive. Any doubts at all and it’s au revoir.

What’s left is keyworded and filed by year and date all in Lightroom. This adds up now to about 55,000 images, almost 2TB. The catalog is on an SSD with a backup to a NAS and two backups to external hard disks.

I did tackle the film images - slides - but foolishly scanned them as not very large jpgs. I should have done much higher quality or, better, TIFFs. I can’t face the rescan job!

Ruthless. Why keep so-so? Are you really going to look back at them?