[dcpropilot]

I usually go through photos periodically and only delete photos that won't have any historical meaning ie test shots, focus adjustments, etc.

[Kerrowdown]

Inspiration through Culling and Curating

I tend to review mine, when major software changes have taken place... just to see if they add anything further to my images.

[Liney]

I bought a scanner a few years ago and started scanning in old negatives and slides, never quite finished the job but came across another couple of negatives last month that I had prints made of so dug out the scanner again. Trouble is the thing is obsolete, and no-one on-line had the drivers....

Good job I hold on to old CDs/DVDs.... trouble is my current PC and Laptop don't have a DVD/CD drive! A search through another box found a plug in USB DVD drive I could use to load the drivers to set up the scanner......

I really should go through and ditch the old images I have no need to keep, but I always feel that well perhaps I should keep them just in case. And I'd need to go through and delete the same ones from the backup drives (two of which are kept in different locations} as by backup strategy is to plug the drive in and copy everything!

[robgski]

I really should go through and ditch the old images I have no need to keep, but I always feel that well perhaps I should keep them just in case.

I appreciate the sentiment, but today I was looking for a shot that I knew I had kept, but hadn't tagged properly. Wading through the dross of 3 year old untagged, un processed images made me realize that I am seldom the type who will put effort into an image I didn't properly process the first time. because I knew it was not that good.

Having said that, I am using a trial of Topaz AI De-Noise, and I am impressed with the results, there are a few shots I have saved, but only a few, that I know will benefit from this software.

End of the first month of a new year, I'll be curating my Flickr stream and removing a lot of poor quality images off my local drive before backing up what I have to storage. As always, I make exceptions for family pictures.

There is value in revisiting older pix, it has gviven me ideas of themes or subjects to revisit, no that I am a better photographer, those images should be better.

[Dartmoor Dave]

It's been interesting rereading this thread after almost a year, and I'm glad to see that it's come back to life because it chimes with what's been going on in my own photography lately.

Back at the beginning of January I put all my "keepers" for the whole decade of 2010-2019 into a single folder and looked through them all in sequence for the first time ever. All the way from the film I was shooting at the start of the decade, to the beginning of the move to digital in 2012, to the entirely digital photography from the last couple of years. And what I found surprised me. The digital photos that I liked best were the ones from about 2014-2015, and from then onwards I found that I liked them less and less. The look that I was actively pursuing even at this time last year is one that I now find doesn't really appeal to me much, while the stuff I was doing five or six years ago still suits me fine.

So it's been a surprising and thought provoking experience. Taking a retrospective overview of the entire decade has given me a completely fresh perspective and made me radically rethink my approach, and I'm now trying to reset myself back to a sort of digital year zero and start again from scratch.

It's something I'd recommend to everyone who hasn't tried it yet: put all the photos that you thought were your best for the entire decade into a single folder and look through them again in sequence. And be prepared for the possibility that you'll end up thinking about them in a completely different way than you did just a couple of hours before.

[Liney]

It's been interesting rereading this thread after almost a year, and I'm glad to see that it's come back to life because it chimes with what's been going on in my own photography lately.

Back at the beginning of January I put all my "keepers" for the whole decade of 2010-2019 into a single folder and looked through them all in sequence for the first time ever. All the way from the film I was shooting at the start of the decade, to the beginning of the move to digital in 2012, to the entirely digital photography from the last couple of years. And what I found surprised me. The digital photos that I liked best were the ones from about 2014-2015, and from then onwards I found that I liked them less and less. The look that I was actively pursuing even at this time last year is one that I now find doesn't really appeal to me much, while the stuff I was doing five or six years ago still suits me fine.

So it's been a surprising and thought provoking experience. Taking a retrospective overview of the entire decade has given me a completely fresh perspective and made me radically rethink my approach, and I'm now trying to reset myself back to a sort of digital year zero and start again from scratch.

It's something I'd recommend to everyone who hasn't tried it yet: put all the photos that you thought were your best for the entire decade into a single folder and look through them again in sequence. And be prepared for the possibility that you'll end up thinking about them in a completely different way than you did just a couple of hours before.

I agree with the sentiment Dave, Over the years I've found myself looking at what I consider my "best", but coming back to them months later I feel that I could have done better and don't feel it is as good as I could do now.

[robgski]

months later I feel that I could have done better and don't feel it is as good as I could do now

That is a perfectly natural response, and within reason, a healthy one. The deciding factor of its benefit is whether to accept that new assessment, critique the image and think about how captured a better image, or process it, etc.
The unhealthy response would be to chuck it all and let the iPhone do the work, or to not try and improve.

Probably the biggest problem I've seen in my shots is being in a hurry to take an image, so I miss the essence of the subject, the thing that made me what to take an image in the first place. Rarely is my subject moving, I have time to view it from several angles and distances, to compose the shot accounting for subject and background, and my choice of settings, so I need to be mindful of that next go-round.

[PDL]

I am a digital hoarder - and a film hoarder too.
I rarely, if ever, delete images. Back in the day (film) I did not get rid of negatives because there was usually one or two frames on a strip that I could use and the "junk" was holding the relatively decent stuff together. As for my digital images, I have RAID drives, DVD/Blu-Ray, a dedicated backup drive (mostly for OS images) and a NAS. The caveat is that if my house is destroyed, all of them are toast.

Now, to be honest, I have lost negatives to vermin (in storage structure and in cardboard boxes and in my garage) and water damage as we moved about the country. I have lost a few digital images over the years, but not anything really important.

I review my images from time to time, essentially as I upgrade my version of Capture One and the catalog is "updated". Very rarely do I remove images from disk. When I copy my images onto DVD/Blu-Ray I tend to look at the RAW images in too. Going back over your images is a good thing to do as it: brings back memories and allows you to see if things are improving/degrading. I have been going through the images that I had in my NG gallery and seeing which ones should be up on PPG (4 images accepted over the last week) and now I will review some more and see if they really should be "up there".

[robgski]

As part of the curation of my Flickr page, I'm organizing some photos into themed albums, and sharing more of them to themed groups.

I notice that many people organize albums by lens, but I don't think of my images by that feature, though I do tag my photos with the type of lens used for easier searching.

---------- Post added 03-07-20 at 17:01 ----------

Back at the beginning of January I put all my "keepers" for the whole decade of 2010-2019 into a single folder and looked through them all in sequence for the first time ever. All the way from the film I was shooting at the start of the decade, to the beginning of the move to digital in 2012, to the entirely digital photography from the last couple of years. And what I found surprised me. The digital photos that I liked best were the ones from about 2014-2015, and from then onwards I found that I liked them less and less. The look that I was actively pursuing even at this time last year is one that I now find doesn't really appeal to me much, while the stuff I was doing five or six years ago still suits me fine.
So it's been a surprising and thought provoking experience. Taking a retrospective overview of the entire decade has given me a completely fresh perspective and made me radically rethink my approach, and I'm now trying to reset myself back to a sort of digital year zero and start again from scratch.

That is a great idea, I should try that as well.

[robgski]

This past month has offered a great opportunity to organize a lot of older images, I've decided to organize them more by broad themes, before they were mostly by year.

I culled out a lot of duplicates, and a lot of poor shots as well.