Which To Keep, Which To Trash (And What Resolution)

[Soul Rebel]

Ive had this camera for only a few days and I am already starting to put together a nice little collection, which is starting to take up a nice little chunk of hard drive space. My problem has been that I just cannot hit the delete button on these photos. I just cant. But I need to learn. Soon.

How do you decide which to keep? Do you look at it and if it doesnt do something for you right away you trash it? Do you keep everything? Do you keep the ones you really like but then keep the ones that you think just might have some potential down the road.....how should I go about this?

Also, what resolution do you save the pics at? Ive got the camera to save them at the highest resolution, which is 2560x1920. I want the best quality but I also want to save some space. I hardly ever print out my pics but when I do the largest I would think about doing is 8x10. Any larger and I lose interest. What would be a good resolution to save with quality and disk space in mind?

 

[Peanuts]

It is very difficult at times to just hit that delete button eh? At first I had to wait a week or two before I was less 'attached' to the images before I coudl purge them of the outright horrible ones, but now I have a different method. I find to find all possible 'errors' with a photo, and determine whether I would ever use this photo or not. For instance if at all out of focus, plain horrible composition that evening cropping won't fix etc. instant trash material. If I come across an image that may fit this criteria but has a special 'element' that none of the other phots in the set have, I will keep it for that 'down the road' case.
One other 'method' is if you have many photos that are similar (Bad habit of mine), go through each, compare, and keep the best.

Personally, I would continue saving your pictures at the highest resolution. You don't want to later on return to an image that you down sized with the intention of blowing it up more and sit there hitting your head on the desk (been there, done that). The other option for saving HD space is to get into the habit of burning your images to at least a couple of discs, one for at home, and the other to store at another location 'just incase'.

Hopefully that helps some Congrats on the new camera

 

[Soul Rebel]

Thanks.

Right now I have them all on my laptop. Since I do nothing on here that takes up the space that I have I am not worried about that. At least not right now. What I have been doing is just keeping them here and backing up the database in ACDSee Pro to the server I have setup and its 80GB hard drive. Im just worried about down the road. I know that the way I am going I am going to fill all of my HD space pretty quickly.

 

[ksmattfish]

Hard drive space is cheap; at most electronics dept. stores you can find external hard drives for less than $1 per gigabyte. Internal HDs are even cheaper.

Looking back at photos I took on film 10 years ago I've noticed that often the ones I like the most now are not the ones I would have kept then. I try to keep everything.

 

[kelox]

I agree with Matt on this one. Since hard drives are so cheap I have a few that are dedicated just to my photos. One for each laptop, then a couple more for at home storage. Plus burm=ning them to DVD to keep at my best friend's house, just in case.

 

[crawdaddio]

Agree^^ HD space is cheap, save everything. That's what I do.

 

[bigfatbadger]

Make a folder called 'discarded' or similar. Stick them in there so they're away from your best!

This way you won't keep seeing them as well, so when you come back to them you might see them in a new light!