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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
08-11-2009, 12:39 PM
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If they don't warrant deleting when I am first looking through them, it's seldom worthwhile to do so later. Consider: with a 1 TB external hard drive costing all of around $100, HD space right now is running about ten cents a gigabyte. If your files are around 10MB a piece, that's a dime to store one hundred pictures. Think about how much time it takes you to find 100 pictures you want to delete, then ask yourself if spending that time was worth saving a dime to you. You'd have to be finding and deleting 7000 pictures an hour just to be paying yourself minimum wage: $7 buys you 70GB = 7000 pictures worth of space on a 1 TB drive.
Of course, if during your original run through your pictures after downloading, you go ahead and tag some that you're pretty sure you won't mind deleting later, than finding the pictures to delete later isn't so hard. That's how I use my "1" rating. These days I normally delete them immediately after looking through a card, but I've got a few thousand 1's from previous years I could easily find and delete in just a few clicks, if I wished.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
08-10-2009, 09:23 AM
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I use ratings in my cataloging program, which allows me to identify several levels of "keepers":
- First, I should mention I may delete some in camera if they are out of focus, badly under/overexposed, and I have an obviously better shot of the same subject. But by this definition, it's probably 90-95% keepers.
- Once imported to my computer I have some pictures I'll rate "1" - my lowest rating. I usually end up deleting these when I'm done.
- The ones I rate "2" don't get deleted, but I don't bother doing an PP or even generating any JPEG's from these. They get cataloged and archived, that's it. These are "keepers" only in the most literal sense of not actually being deleted. Maybe 80-90% of what comes off the camera.
- The ones I rate "3" or higher are the ones that get any attention at all, then. I may do some PP, and I'll definitely generate JPEG versions - medium resolution, big enough to view full screen or print 4x6, small enough that I can have as many as I want on my laptop internal drive forever. These are keepers in the sense that these are the images I actually have on my computer and have available to look at. This is maybe 30-40% of what I shoot.
- The ones I rate "4" or higher are the ones I think are special enough to post or otherwise share with others. I'll share some 3's sometimes if I think someone might be interested enough in the subject itself to want to see images not special enough to otherwise merit a 4. The 4's are the top 10%.
- Someday I plan to go back through my older images and identify a few as 5's - these are the ones that I still think about and can still see in my head years later. I've seen no point in giving anything this rating during my initial rating period (which is usually during my first viewing of the images), but the idea of going back and letting the test of time tell me which deserve 5's is appealing. This would be *way* less than 1% - I'm thinking on the order of 1 in several thousand.
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