What do you do with unused photos?

[RedWylder]

Do you store them forever and ever? Do you toss them? I'm getting so many crappy photos but I only throw away the truly atrocious ones.

 

[480sparky]

I only ditch the OOFs, bad exposures, etc. I keep anything that's sharp. I don't care about the composition, lighting, white balance.... I keep it.

I may need elements of that image to copy into another shot.

 

[e.rose]

I keep pretty much everything. Unless it's PAINFULLY obvious that I will NEVER ever need it for anything ever again... I keep everything.

 

[Juice]

I keep almost everything. Even if the picture isn't usable for public display, a lot of them still serve as a photo-diary so-to-speak for the places/people I've seen in my travels. Every so often I'll go through old shoots and I always see something that sparks the memory.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

I keep everything, because i am an obsessive compulsive hoarder, and you never know when you might need that for a sculpture someday.

 

[Stryker]

Keep it and burn them on a CD or DVD. They are your progress report card and when you look back at them, you'll say "wow, i have improved'

 

[photocist]

i print each shot on toilet paper and wipe my butt with them

 

[RockstarPhotography]

I only keep proofs of photos i've sent to clients. Even if they only purchased one out of 70, i'll keep all 70. They stay on a hard drive for 3 years. After that, they get burned to a disk. I go through my disks every year and decide what I should keep and what should be thrown. Nothing under 5 years gets thrown. In the contracts for the clients it states pictures will be held for reproduction for 5 years unless otherwise asked to keep. Random pics i'll generally toss out after awhile.

 

[Forkie]

I usually keep everything, too. I sometimes find myself going back over photos I previously disregarded and seeing what I can do with them in Photoshop. I do delete some now and again though if, maybe, they are over a year old and I still can't do anything with them.

 

[freekyjynx]

I've started to delete the ones that are completely useless for one thing or another. The ones I take that are even semi decent of my family I keep. Some get printed, some don't, but they're all memories.

 

[fokker]

I apparently am different than most people. I delete most I take, only keeping the ones I think will turn out, which I guess means I need to take better pictures. =) Each thing I shoot takes up 40MiB (whether that's high or low, I do not know), so I don't really want to waste the space or waste time dealing with them. And normally I can tell just by looking at a shot if it will turn out after editing. Even with deleting most I still maintain a "diary" of my life as a photographer since I consistently like a few of the photos I take.

The disadvantage of my method is it irritates people when I delete a bunch while showing the photos to them. Next next delete delete delete... next... delete...

As for the ones I do keep, I store them on a few terabyte external drive. By deleting a bunch of photos, I'll be able to not buy a new drive for quite some time.

I'm like this as well. I don't see the point hoarding terabytes worth of bad photos. At first I was compelled to keep every shot with the mentality that each shot is special and can never be reproduced again. But so what, every nanosecond in time that you are not taking a picture is a special memory that is lost forever, so why keep a few of those memories that really have no meaning or photographic merit at all.

 

[nick_cool]

In 35mm era I tried to avoid to take photos that will end "unused"
But sometimes happen that after a time I found more interesting this ones over the selected ones, so... points of view changes.

 

[Forkie]

I apparently am different than most people. I delete most I take, only keeping the ones I think will turn out, which I guess means I need to take better pictures. =) Each thing I shoot takes up 40MiB (whether that's high or low, I do not know), so I don't really want to waste the space or waste time dealing with them. And normally I can tell just by looking at a shot if it will turn out after editing. Even with deleting most I still maintain a "diary" of my life as a photographer since I consistently like a few of the photos I take.

The disadvantage of my method is it irritates people when I delete a bunch while showing the photos to them. Next next delete delete delete... next... delete...

As for the ones I do keep, I store them on a few terabyte external drive. By deleting a bunch of photos, I'll be able to not buy a new drive for quite some time.

I'm like this as well. I don't see the point hoarding terabytes worth of bad photos. At first I was compelled to keep every shot with the mentality that each shot is special and can never be reproduced again. But so what, every nanosecond in time that you are not taking a picture is a special memory that is lost forever, so why keep a few of those memories that really have no meaning or photographic merit at all.

I kind of agree with this. I do get rid of disasters, like out of focus shots and blackouts, but if I have a load of snapshots that are OK, but not good enough to display, then I keep them just as a collection of snaps. Particularly holiday snaps, because although they aren't "good photography" they are still fine to share with friends and family to show them the holiday.

 

[cabrosh]

I toss the really bad and the so-so if it's something I have tons of, say the local zoo or quick 6 shots of the same thing. Family, friends, and both edited and unedited vacation shots get burned to backup DVDs. Anything I might want to look at stays on the computer and is also backed up to a 1 T external drive. If I then look at a picture and decide to delete it from the hard drive, it's still on the 1TB drive, just in case. So I guess my answer is cull, backup twice, and save.

 

[Overread]

Keep it and burn them on a CD or DVD. They are your progress report card and when you look back at them, you'll say "wow, i have improved'

Forget DVDs, just get an external harddrive. These days they are far more affordable for a lot of space and also far more reliable and faster (DVD burning takes ages and unless you've got the right DVDs, the right burner and the right software the failure rate can be a right pain).


As for me I review photos whilst shooting, but I never delete whilst shooting. On my 400D delete and delete all were right next to each other so I didn't want to risk putting a card out of action by deleting all and then having to use restore software on it. Furthermore even up to the 7D telling fine details on the LCD screen is difficult to impossible at best- and its very easy for things to look very different on the big screen than on the tiny screen. So I never waste time with it - I just ensure that I've more card space than I ever need when going out shooting so that I can just keep shooting.

When it comes to the computer I generally just keep hold of everything I get - I sometimes go through and prune out the totally failed shots (ie totally black - I keep the totally out of focus shots - this seems to be called "art" by some so I'm hoping that in 20 years I can sell them for millions! ).


Of course the other end to this scale is a constant desire and method in trying to reduce waste photos by improving skill - this is something that only comes with time; however it is also doubled edged since as the number of big errors gets smaller we get more fussy with little details which tends to keep our failure rates pretty even