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I just completed my second week of travels in Ireland and am waiting for better weather to head back to Galway for the last few days of this visit. I am reviewing the 2000-odd photos that I have taken so far and “culling” out the ones I know I will never work on. I just happened to read an article titled “Keep the Best, Delete the Rest” from Digital Photography School in which it was suggested that only the best photos should be kept. This article has created a large buzz of comments, some taking this as sage advice, but others suggesting keeping all photos. One theory is that as image editing improves, some photos now seen as rubbish may be salvageable in the future. I believe that the photographer’s sense of what is good and what is not also changes over time, such that the flare (or other such flaw) appearing to make a photo undesirable now may make the photo perfect for something in the future. But the question is — will we ever go back to those photos, or will we continue to take new photos to capture our changing vision? I know from experience that my vision has changed from when I first started out. And my gear has also changed. I wonder will I ever go back to photos that I took with less sophisticated gear?

For now I have a workflow that gives me some security and that I hope will work for me going forward. I shoot in JPEG+RAW. The JPEG is for quick viewing in Windows, but I always work from the RAW image. After a day of shooting while traveling I download the photos to my laptop in a folder labelled with the date, which is a sub-folder in a folder labelled by general location, and then copy them over to an external hard drive. Having two copies gives me some security since most likely I will need to clear a memory card or two as I continue to take photos. When I have time to review photos I create new folders within the dated folder labelled by a specific geographic location. I can freely delete photos now, since I have a copy of all images on the external hard drive. To do so I import the photos into Lightroom3. I review each photo and give a grade of three stars to something I may think is workable. Then I select the photos rated as three stars and can compare similar photos against each other to pick only the best photo to work on. It is given 4 stars only after I have applied some development settings in Lightroom3. I then export to Photoshop CS5 and edit again as needed before saving the finished file as a TIF, reducing the image size to 720 pixels on the longest side and saving again as a jpeg for the web.

So to get back to the subject at hand, just how much deleting do I do? For now, not a lot. I will delete obviously out of focus images, images that I got the exposure wrong on the first try but the second shot is better, and I cull some of the duplicates that I invariably take just on the off chance that one of them is less sharp. I feel I should get rid of more, but luckily external hard drives are inexpensive. I would like to be more ruthless with my culling, but I am not at that point yet. Afterall, I have only about 60,000 images….. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you handle file storage.

To close, I want to share a photo taken on the first “leg” of this trip that represents some of what I love about Ireland. It was taken in County Tipperary as we approached Lough Derg. This image manages to combine the rolling green hills and one of the many lakeshores, a church ruin, cloud-filled skies, and cows. Technical details: Canon 5D Mk II with Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens at 75mm, 1/80 sec at f/22, ISO 200, hand held.