Wednesday 8 February 2012

Deleting Photos

Does anyone else feel a sense of guilt when deleting photos off the computer? I rarely do it, but as our computer has told me it has 1.5GB left of space on it, I have decided to have a cull... I often take a couple of shots when trying to get the right picture, but sometimes can't decide which I like best so just keep them all. I star the good ones and just filter to look at those, so never see the slightly blurry/out of focus/just not right photos. But really, it would be better to look at them all and get rid of the ones that are no good, but I find it hard. I'm rationalising it by saying, well I took it in the first place so I should be able to remove it, but I find it's particularly hard when it's of a loved one for example!

I think part of it is not having a good system for rating photos. I tend to 3 star anything I like and then occasionally give a 4 or 5 star to something really good, but I should use it more rigorously than that, and perhaps delete anything that doesn't get a star at all. I'd love to hear how other people get around the issue of taking thousands of photos and dealing with them afterwards without just buying more and more hard drive space!

However I must admit it feels a little cleansing to start with 150 photos in a folder and whittle it down to 50. It makes the browsing experience much more pleasant certainly! It's probably also good to realise that while it's great to make the most of digital and take lots of photos from different angles of the same scene, it's better to take time at the taking and get it right with one or two shots. Something I'm learning as I progress in my studies perhaps...

But there are some photos that are keepers no matter what technical quality they are... my son must be the most photographed little boy ever (or close to...)

Dress ups

1 comment:

  1. I seldom - if ever - delete photos of family members (even pets). The ones I struggle with are the technically fine photos of nothing in particular. I guess I took them for the fun of taking a picture, and they're of no real value - but like you I struggle to delete them. In the end I just bought an external hard drive - which is cheating I guess.

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