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?

If I were to delete the worst photos of a dive, I would only be left with a couple or none at all. 🤣

Unlike the others have said, I only delete the clearly bad images, and for me clearly bad is totally out of focus, accidental triggers, etc.

I like to have all the images with the specie tags on them, maybe an image is very bad but is the only photo of a specie that I have.

Talking in consideration that the storage is quite cheap, I have a 12TB for the images (land and underwater), every dive or trip is a folder numbered by date.

I almost never delete the photos I take. Serious cleaning takes a lot of time. And the disks are not that expensive (HDD are cheaper than free time). After the trip, the photo catalog goes to storage. By marking the years and places of travel, it is easy to find even after 20 years.
Then, based on it, I make a preliminary selection for viewing and further work. Usually, it includes all the interesting shots and animal species in my opinion.

I use this selection as a search tool.
When I have time, I use it to select photos that are worth processing for publications, competitions, and so on. Often, it is not these photos that are selected, but neighboring takes.

For example, because one format is better for a magazine, and another for printing on the wall.

Old selections have another effect - I can look through them and remember old dives. Successful or not. This can be useful if you go to the same place after a long time. (In this case, unsuccessful shots can be more useful than successful ones!)

Ahhhh, I feel better now, I am not the only borderline image hoarder, lol. Probably need to update my storage to ssd.

Off subject how do you get a link to your website or youtube page to show in your signature?

56 minutes ago, aquabluedreams said:

Ahhhh, I feel better now, I am not the only borderline image hoarder, lol. Probably need to update my storage to ssd.

Off subject how do you get a link to your website or youtube page to show in your signature?

If you go into your profile then Account Setting and click on the Signature tab.... you can then create up to ?3 lines of text.

HDD are cheap --> why should I spend a lot of time to delete the bad, sorry not very good photos ?

During the diving trip I spent 1, 2 or 3 hours to delete the out of focus etc pictures. maximum 5% I guess.
I make every 2 or 3 days backups on 2 external SDD
the number of pictures / day are beetween 200 and 400 sometime 500.

When I'm back home make a copy of the folder (year/month/day) with the Raw and the LR xmp.

A Sync on LR at home and I can work on the new pictures on the big screen.

I have since more than 15 year a RAID 6 , with 7 HDD and one spare.. but I ran out of space (not only because the photos)

I made every months some backups on separated hdd.

Now I use only a RAID 5 with 3 HDD +/- 30 TB and I shut down the old server with the raid contoler and the 8 disks.

I have enough old HDD with a lot of backups of my pictures...

comming back from 6 diving days in Ustica... 12 dives --> 80 GB and 1900 photo.. 🤣

6 hours ago, CaolIla said:

HDD are cheap --> why should I spend a lot of time to delete the bad, sorry not very good photos ?

During the diving trip I spent 1, 2 or 3 hours to delete the out of focus etc pictures. maximum 5% I guess.
I make every 2 or 3 days backups on 2 external SDD
the number of pictures / day are beetween 200 and 400 sometime 500.

When I'm back home make a copy of the folder (year/month/day) with the Raw and the LR xmp.

A Sync on LR at home and I can work on the new pictures on the big screen.

I have since more than 15 year a RAID 6 , with 7 HDD and one spare.. but I ran out of space (not only because the photos)

I made every months some backups on separated hdd.

Now I use only a RAID 5 with 3 HDD +/- 30 TB and I shut down the old server with the raid contoler and the 8 disks.

I have enough old HDD with a lot of backups of my pictures...

comming back from 6 diving days in Ustica... 12 dives --> 80 GB and 1900 photo.. 🤣

I gave up on using RAID a long time back as I worked out it's not really a backup, it's just a means to have the storage stay on line is a physical disk in the array fails and it's quite possible the hardware can fail and take out the whole array. It always seemed problematic to add more storage as well - quite likely I didn't know what I was doing, but it always seemed like another flaming hoop to jump through. I use duplicated large capacity drives these days.

I also found coming back to an old HDD that I had not used for a number of years was a problem. I had 3 smaller disks in a RAID5 array stored in their original packaging and when I came back to them after a number of years to see if they worked before either disposing or recycling them I found I couldn't format 2 out of the 3. They worked just fine when I transferred their files to single big drive years previously.

My percentage clean up is a bit more than yours though for most dives, I seem to make a lot of bad shots!🤣

I take approx. 70-200 photos/dive. Usually on the same day I transfer the better files to my notebook via LRc (about 40% keeper rate estimated). These photos I take home for later processing in LRc/PS. The usable photos, which are further processed, are assigned ratings, starting with 1*. From the processed photos I select 80-150 per dive trip to assemble a slide show. About 70%-80% remain unprocessed/unrated and are deleted from the disc.

All processed photos (also the RAW files) are kept on a NAS server (that is backed up every night to another NAS server).

=> still too many files that are stored and never ever used for anything, but it would break my heart to delete them...😄

Wolfgang

Edited July 5Jul 5 by makar0n

9 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

I gave up on using RAID a long time back as I worked out it's not really a backup, it's just a means to have the storage stay on line is a physical disk in the array fails and it's quite possible the hardware can fail and take out the whole array.

My old RAID 6 + spare was exactly 16 years old when I shut it down.
Yes 16 years.
Not a single HD failure,

A dedicated RAID controller (Adaptec)

All based on a MS 2003 server...

The only problem I had was when I shut years ago the server down during holiday ... when I came back the Motherboard was dead... I bought a new one and that's it.



RAID <> Backup RAID is only there to reduce the chance to need a restore of the backup HD... ;)

And you know Backups... I make 1...2 ... each month after that ... it ends to 1 backup / year 🤣


( fyi I work in IT)




To days you have On-line storage in the cloud for realy sheap..(MS office 365 as example.. ) 1TB / user if you buy the familly you will have a lot of storage and more for lees as 10 € a month

9 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

My percentage clean up is a bit more than yours though for most dives, I seem to make a lot of bad shots!🤣

In the past I had much more bad shoots... but since I have the R5... the bad shoots decreased a lot.

3 hours ago, Architeuthis said:

All processed photos (also the RAW files) are kept on a NAS server (that is backed up every night to another NAS server).

Very good. ❤️❤️

I'm in the renew of my computers... my new RAID is connected on my PC.. BUT the plan is to build a new "server" under Windows 11 (I know I know... but it's not the subject of this topic... ;) )

I'm not alone at home others are using my "server"... but a very important point is that the Server and the backup (for you the 2 NAS) need to be on 2 separated "location"... in case of flooding, fire or intruders.

In the past I made the backups automaticly on HDs connected on my PC... I'll make the same again in the futur ( my PC is in reality a server case with a lot of HDD and SSD ;) )

Before I worked with tape.. but todays it's to slow.. and HDD are so cheap.

3 hours ago, Architeuthis said:

too many files that are stored and never ever used for anything, but it would break my heart to delete them...😄

Good explanation of the situation. It's the same for me.

56 minutes ago, CaolIla said:

My old RAID 6 + spare was exactly 16 years old when I shut it down.
Yes 16 years.
Not a single HD failure,

A dedicated RAID controller (Adaptec)

All based on a MS 2003 server...

The only problem I had was when I shut years ago the server down during holiday ... when I came back the Motherboard was dead... I bought a new one and that's it.



RAID <> Backup RAID is only there to reduce the chance to need a restore of the backup HD... ;)

And you know Backups... I make 1...2 ... each month after that ... it ends to 1 backup / year 🤣


( fyi I work in IT)




To days you have On-line storage in the cloud for realy sheap..(MS office 365 as example.. ) 1TB / user if you buy the familly you will have a lot of storage and more for lees as 10 € a month

True but there I still come across people who think it's a backup. I don't work in IT but know enough about it to get in trouble regularly. 🤣

I know backups well enough, still doesn't mean i do them as often as I should unfortunately.🤔 The most basic rule is don't format your card till the stuff you have downloaded from it has been backed up. I'm going to need to expand my storage soon the 4TB main drive and backup are starting to get full.

1 hour ago, CaolIla said:

In the past I had much more bad shoots... but since I have the R5... the bad shoots decreased a lot.

Mine tends not to be a camera problem, I tend to be a lazy photographer sometimes.

WOW.......WOW.......WOW.......You guys amaze me how you configure back ups for what many (most?) say you'll never access those files again.

EVER...... LOL.....

After years of photo agencies submissions and direct magazines, book publishers, etc. submissions (back in the slide days) I realized there's now hundreds to thousands of shooters with the same exact wonderful colorful images from everywhere, just like many of my photos........

So I stopped......

Stopped trying to duplicate what's been done. Stopped duplicating what I myself shot in oceans worldwide. Stopped doing what I call "SS" as in Shampoo Shooting". Lather, Rinse, Repeat.......

Since then I challenge myself shooting and editing a few pics from any trip.

All I've ever backed up with is a now discontinued Apple Time Capsule that backs up whatever automatically. Whether it's transferred from my iPhone to iCloud (I'm all Apple guy here) so any keepers are either on my newest MacBook Air M2 or 2017 ancient iMac 27" computer (soon to be replaced by a Mac Mini M4 and big beautiful monitor.)

Both my machines have 1TB of storage and I'm nowhere near using the space.

BUT......I'm a brutal "delete" shooter and critical of my own pictures.

First pass on either machine I go through a full screen review. I've worn out the delete key's label on 2 keyboards of the old iMac.,,,,,,,,Granted they're only sent to the DELETE / TRASH file and I might go back but not likely....My initial reaction is usually a firm yes or no.....

On my hosted trips I jokingly tell folks they should select 10-20 shots unless you want to include fun people pics, vacation pics or whatever as a slide show. Those stellar picks you proudly show your friends and family. They'll think you're David Doubilet, Brian Skerry or whomever!!!! LOL......

Like many I can search keepers quickly through year / month / trip, etc.

I've never bought Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop although I did have Elements for awhile many moons ago.

For decades I've use the included Apple Photos App included free with every iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini, etc. The newest Photos version is maybe 95% Aperture which was Apple's PRO program before they threw in the towel to Adobe.

Maybe I'm the outlier not keeping a super organized database, keyboarding, etc. I don't know.......

As mentioned in many of my posts I'm the laziest but fun loving shooter out there.......Not trying to be a rebel or critic, it's just a choice at almost 72 years old, diving and shooting for 55 years now....

I do wrestle with myself from buying new gizmos and keep shooting the same old images.......Seeing great pics everywhere these days is in everyone's subconscious. We can't help but see a similar scene in front of us but then it will be OUR photo so it MUST be different :)

Last year I said I'd never buy a larger sensor camera (MFT, APS-C or FF) but now am back using an APS-C camera. But still no strobes so far.

The new Ikelite RC165 and Ecko are tempting me so we'll see.....MUST....RESIST....TEMPTATION.....

My recent posted SS Thistlegorm and other Red Sea trip shots were captured using a pair of 2000 lumen video lights. Most images I shared were taken with ambient light and tweaked using the SeaReal App on my iPhone. I was tickled how many looked after some editing back in Photos. The SeaReal App which I've mentioned previously is only for iPhone and only to adjust color.

Any additional editing of shadows, highlights, contrast, etc. I do in the Apple Photos App on a computer after Airdropping the SeaReal color adjusted file.

Digital has given us the capability to save anything and everything but I contend we shouldn't......

Keep enjoying UW image making however you like and I fully enjoy hearing what others do to finalize their images :)

I'll continue in the "less is more" camp whether shooting, saving, editing and sharing :)

David Haas

Edited July 5Jul 5 by dhaas

Thanks David for your point of view... I don't agree all what you say but I (trying to) understand it.

I'm a hobby photographe and happy with that. I allways avoided to make some photographics workshop.... why... I don't want to heard from the teacher.. You must do that or that. In all cases this workshop will have some influence on me.

I've my feeling... my approach of what I want to obtain... I'm not trying to copy what the other made... I want to make photo I like... no photo for the others.
If some others like it fine ;)

The only "workshop" was a masterclass of Alex last year. I paided to learn some technics It was interesting.. I'm using some technics now...

I load everything from a dive into Lightroom, hit P for Pick the best ones, then cull from there. Out of the 6 photos of the subject I pick the best one, maybe two if it's a different angle or something. Then I cull from there, either unflagging the worst or rating the best. Finally I select unrated photos only, hit X to reject, then Delete Rejected Photos > Delete From Disk. I know others who are more ruthless, "how many photos of a Garabaldi do I need? I keep the 5 best ones."

I do a local dive day ~once a month and 1-2 week-long trips a year, and I tend to have ~500 photos a year that I keep. I have tons of storage and backup so I don't sweat the size, and sometimes it's nice to look back at previous years to see how I've improved. Every year I make a calendar for family, so I can look at my 13 best photos of the year going back around 20 years. And I save all the RAW files so that I can go back to old photos with Lightroom 2035 and get the great white shark in focus :)

thanks to everyone for sharing some of their processes! I find what others do so interesting - super stickybeak of me, I know.

I'm in the quasi-hoarder camp. I'll do a cull of the crap first up - I use LR and do the X for adios and 8 (green flag) for keepers. Each cull session ends with selecting all the Xs and deleting them from disk forever. Stuff that doesn't get either hangs out on the hard drive for some future cull session or the aliens, whichever comes first.

I do like to wander through old stuff on occasion and sometimes I find a gem that I skipped. I also very much like to a have a visual record of things so even meh photos serve a purpose for me sometimes. As others have said, storage is pretty cheap in the scheme of things (and honestly, the ssd drives are so danged cute!)

I often think I'd like to be one of those people who take more great shots than meh/crap per dive, who really push my boundaries to try new shooting styles, who tag/keyword stuff, who has friends/family who'd genuinely love a calendar or booklet or something (but I suspect mostly their interest is politeness) and who gets organized enough to print things to display in my own home...but, yeah, nah, I don't see that totally happening anytime soon!

I dive every single week when at home and 1 diving trip per year, so my process is, when at home, It doesn´t matter if I have dive one or four times in the weekend, during sunday afternoon I import all the pictures to LR, I organize it by year, month, day and something special on the pictures. I make a selection between the pictures and usually keep 2 or 3 pictures, not more. I only keep the pictures that I really like, obviously all of them with technical fails are deleted, everything is tagged by species, place, etc. After that I process it and keep the jpeg in my computer. I upload every file to my NAS since LR every month.

During a dive trip is almost the same, but I make the selection every night and make a copy of everything in an external hard disc. When I arrive home everything goes to my NAS from LR.

I caution about over-editing. For example I got into an argument with my agent's representative about the species identification of a juvenile salmonid fish. The select image for publication that my agent had was the esthetic champ from the series. The next shot however showed the anal fin of one of the fish splayed out so all rays could see. I did a cropped super blow-up of the anal fin and emailed it back to win my case. (The number of anal fin rays is an important characteristic for IDing salmonids). Non-savers can also be used for context such as location of shots. Rejects are also useful for posting on forums, ROTFL ...

Interesting read here, and I'm constantly thinking of or looking for "better" ways to do things. I use LightRoom on my desktop, but my library is only on NAS. It may be slightly quicker on local SSD, but really I think it's just the import that could speed up.

I shoot only in raw (except for my son's soccer matches, which I take in continuous shooting JPG, and often get up to 500 shots in a match). And I keep almost everything. On each import, I'll flick through very quickly and flag the ones I like most, unflag the massively out of focus or other atrocities, and then go the flagged ones for editing.

For diving photos, I'll rate the ones I like with stars, but TBH my star ratings aren't very consistent. I'll also colour tag "blue" ones that I think are worthy for exporting for any purpose, I then tag all of them with the dive site (hierchical keyword Diving / <Country> / <Region> / <Site> and give a Job ID of the dive number to correlate back to my dive log.

I also use the iNaturalist plugin for LR (https://github.com/rcloran/lr-inaturalist-publish?tab=readme-ov-file), so group any sets of the same subject into the same plugin group, then drag the "goodish" ones to the iNaturalist sync collection (this allows for easy taxonomy / species searching)

I also have a filter collection that I use to export my "blue" tagged photos to an export folder where I can include them in my dive log.

My NAS is a RAID10 array (using 4 hard drives), and also holds a lot more than just photos. After six years, I actually had a hard drive failure about 2 months ago, and took to the opportunity to upgrade the 4x4TB array to a 4x12TB array.

For backup, I do a daily backup from the NAS to Amazon S3.

All in all, the photos take up very little space. For 25 years of photo library (some years with more photos than others) my photo library is less than 2TB. I can't say as much for the video, which is much more painful for me to catalog and edit, and also uses much, much more space than photos, even thought I focus predominantly on photography with video just an occasional thing.

One great example of the benefit of keeping rather than purging, is similar to what @Tom Kline stated above. There is one photo that I published on iNaturalist that I didn't really think too much of. It was right at the end of a night dive, just as I was surfacing, and managed to get one quick shot off of a juvenile shark. Two people have requested to use that photo in a publication, so even though I wouldn't consider it a keeper, others did. And I'm glad I still have the raw image so I could re-edit it for their publications. (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/124560131)

A similar situation occurred when I took my backup camera out for a dive and saw a group of sea hares for the first time ever in that location. Uploaded to iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259299585) and again for a photo which I'm not particularly proud of, someone else thought worthy of publishing in a local marine life publication.