Aggressive Cropping Of Rejected Shots

[Thayli]

Hit my hard drive limit for pics a couple of months ago and made a new years resolution to clear out some of the rubbish I've accumulated this year. Of course this just means I spend large volumes of time trying to save bad pics rather than deleting very much at all. (Often with horrifying disregard for limb or head chopping rules). Since I've not posted much recently (although i do hope to get back into it in the new year), I thought I'd share some of my rummage finds. So far I've decided not to delete around 700 shots. But on the plus side Ive already got at least 40 in the recycle bin, so not that bad for 3 days...... :er:

 

[NedM]

Why don't you just invest in an external hard drive?

 

[Thayli]

Its more about the sheer volume of sets i have that never get looked at, or in most cases even processed of any kind. Whats the point of having 5000 raw files if all you ever look at is 300 jpgs? Gimme a break, i'm trying to be tidy lol.

 

[weepete]

I sympathise. Recently I did this too and just ended up upgrading my computer. I'd tend towards adding an internal HDD rather than an external one if you can. I hate getting rid of photos after I've transferred them out of my camera though, but that's probably why I have 15,000 on my HDD. I have let it get to the stage where it takes AGES to go through them and now it's easyier to leave it but I really should go through them and sort it out.

 

[runnah]

Storage is cheap, my time isn't.

 

[Designer]

It looks like you're saving the right ones. I must commend you on tossing 40 files, though. I'm sure they were large files.

 

[Big Mike]

It's easy to toss the bad ones, it's easy to keep the great ones....the hard part is figuring out what to do with the 'only good' ones. After a while, they do tend to pile up.

My philosophy is that I'm probably not going to do anything with the 'only good' shots. I have the best shots and use them accordingly, but what would I gain from using 'OK' shots? Of course, some of them could probably be worked on and maybe raised to the great level....but unless I have to, I'm probably not going to do that.

So what I do (when I get around to it), is to go though my catalogue and cull out the ones that don't represent my best work. It has to be sometime after the project, so that I'm less emotionally tied to the images. Although, the more 'into' this I am, the better I get at deleting those images right after I import them.

I don't have a set time limit, but if it's been a long time, and I'm pretty sure I won't re-edit them, then I'll export them as large JPEGs and [gasp] delete the raw files.

 

[Tailgunner]

I understand. Now I generally try and tidy up as I go, it's just something I got in the habit of doing back in my P&S days. The problem is, back then I only had to sort through 30-50 shots, now I'm sorting through 100-300 shots. It's very time consuming for sure. And now that I've upgraded to CS6, I can easily fix minor issues with a photo that would have otherwise not been fixed using my old software. This changes everything, I have the ability to turn a decent photo into something worth wild. So I need to invest in an external hard drive.