[pete_pf]

not house cleaning, hard drive cleaning i haven't cleaned out bad photos in such a long while. i think i just cleared about 1gb in about 30mins hehe in my gut i'm always thinking "what if something comes up and i may need this shot?", so i'm being a bit conservative with the delete button. good to do a little spring cleaning once in a while though

[reeftool]

I never delete useable photos. However your post did make me think. I have boxes and albums of prints from the days of film that take up a wall. Considering the numbers of shots I now take since switching to digital I will eventually need a server with terrabytes of hard drive space to hold everything plus backups. I suppose some deleting may become necessary but I don't like the idea. I now have 4x the HD space I had 2 years ago.

[Marc Sabatella]

See my comments in another thread on this. A 1 TB drive costs around $100. That's 10 cents per gigabyte. Spending 30 minutes to save a dime - that's what, working under a quarter an hour? that might have seemed like a good deal when I was seven, but these days, I'd just as soon spend the dime to save me the time it would take delete a gigabyte worth of pictures.

There's a great story (whether true or not, I don't know) in the first edition of The DAM Book, where Peter Krogh claims one of the famous pictures of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky together was one that the photographer who took it had considered deleting, as it was just a pretty random picture (obviously, he had plenty of other shots of Clinton, or it might have seemed worthwhile just for him alone). Then the story broke, and the picture shot up in value.

[Kerrowdown]

Just back 'em all up to a large external drive or two (to allow for future failures on one), then you delete want you want of the PC / Laptop without fears or worries.