3 ms·

Culling is an important part of the photographic process. However, far be it from me to tell another photographer what they should and shouldn't keep. We all ha

by jscheel 11y ago

Culling is an important part of the photographic process. However, far be it from me to tell another photographer what they should and shouldn't keep. We all have our quirks. Good luck convincing me to delete even a blurry photo of my daughter :) Storage is still a huge problem for photographers. There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process. It's still outside the realm of a lot of photographers' skillsets.

slantyyz 11y ago
>> Culling is an important part of the photographic process. It is indeed important, but it is hard. I was a pack rat until about last year. I think I must have culled about 50% of my library's images, and then I converted whatever remaining RAW files I had to JPEG, which shrunk it to about a third of its original size. I realized there was no point in keeping the RAWs after I did my post -- I'm not that serious a photographer, and I was never going to revisit the images for editing again. Of course, every person has their own requirements -- I'm only speaking for myself. I also tried to be my own harshest critic, and each image had to meet only -one- of two criteria: 1- Am I be willing to print it and display it? 2- Do I have a strong emotional connection to the photo? (this is how a lot of less-than-perfect images survived the cull) These days, I spend more time culling after a day of shooting than I do in post on my keepers. More often than not, I will delete up to 80% of my shots in a day, and a lot of the deleted shots are perfectly fine. >> There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process. My own process is relatively simple - I point Crashplan to three targets: the cloud, a mapped drive (NAS) and a local drive that's designated for backup only. I also periodically burn my library to BluRay discs (thankfully my library is now small enough to fit on 2x50GB discs). I also intend to use Google Photos, but just haven't found the time to do it yet.

by jscheel 11y ago

slantyyz 11y ago

>> Culling is an important part of the photographic process. It is indeed important, but it is hard. I was a pack rat until about last year. I think I must have culled about 50% of my library's images, and then I converted whatever remaining RAW files I had to JPEG, which shrunk it to about a third of its original size. I realized there was no point in keeping the RAWs after I did my post -- I'm not that serious a photographer, and I was never going to revisit the images for editing again. Of course, every person has their own requirements -- I'm only speaking for myself. I also tried to be my own harshest critic, and each image had to meet only -one- of two criteria: 1- Am I be willing to print it and display it? 2- Do I have a strong emotional connection to the photo? (this is how a lot of less-than-perfect images survived the cull) These days, I spend more time culling after a day of shooting than I do in post on my keepers. More often than not, I will delete up to 80% of my shots in a day, and a lot of the deleted shots are perfectly fine. >> There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process. My own process is relatively simple - I point Crashplan to three targets: the cloud, a mapped drive (NAS) and a local drive that's designated for backup only. I also periodically burn my library to BluRay discs (thankfully my library is now small enough to fit on 2x50GB discs). I also intend to use Google Photos, but just haven't found the time to do it yet.