Managing photos

conamor said:

I definatly love the discussion here

I have a question. When I takepictures, I take hundreds of photos for an event. I store them in Aperture but then after I look at the project, I have so many pictures that are similar but I am not able to delete them even if they are close. I find that I am deleting memories... The thing is that my library is now 250GB...

Any input on that? Should I say to myself that I have to delete them? They look the same, I suppose I keep the best shot..?

Click to expand...

I totally understand this. It is a hard thing to do...delete a "memory"

I decided a couple months back to take some time and go through some old photos...as in my first digital camera (Nikon 995 - somewhere in early 2000s)
I shot some photos of my nephew playing soccer. they are snapshots...many are blurry. some that aren't do not have any real focus/storyline going. But I had many, many photos. and I saved them because of the memories. So, the other month, I started to delete blurry ones.easy. then go back and look over the remaining and think do I REALLY need/want these pictures that aren't great...maybe not even good either?


Culling your photos right after you import (some do it before import) can help you out a lot. I like to go through and immediately delete fuzzy/blurry ones. AND I try to mark bad shots with a 1-2 STAR. this helps weed out the sheer number of photos you need to look over. If I have 4-5 shots that are nearly identical. I try to find a spot in focus and see if any of the shots don't have that in focus. this helps to weed out 1 or 2.

The problem with leaving them, as you noted, is they take up space...then when you REALLY need to start sorting the good from the bad...there are eve MORE images to look over and it becomes TOO much. Take the time on import, or with THAT week to review the photos. even if you merely star them and that way in a month's time (or another time period) you can just search for the lower stars and see if you can delete them...then make sure to empty your trash bin.

conamor said:

I definatly love the discussion here

I have a question. When I takepictures, I take hundreds of photos for an event. I store them in Aperture but then after I look at the project, I have so many pictures that are similar but I am not able to delete them even if they are close. I find that I am deleting memories... The thing is that my library is now 250GB...

Any input on that? Should I say to myself that I have to delete them? They look the same, I suppose I keep the best shot..?

Click to expand...

By nature, I am a pack-rat. So I tend to delete very few photos. However, I also take far fewer photos than seems to be the norm these days. So one suggestion is to simply take more time with each photo, but to take fewer of them. Work at making each photo worth at least 3 stars. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to recognize that you can't take a good photograph under the current conditions and to just put the camera down. Personally, I'd rather hear someone's own experience of seeing a pod of Orcas off the starboard bow rather than looking at 3 dozen badly focussed pictures of rippling water and the excuses of why the 'camera couldn't focus fast enough... maybe it's time to upgrade to a better camera.'

However, scattershot photography is a viable option.

One way to deal with it is to very quickly sort your photos into Good vs Not Good.

One technique that I like is to do a quick scan of all the photos from an event, and simply decide if they rate 1 star or not. Anything that is out of focus, black, has a thumb in front, etc. The Real Crap doesn't get a star... everything else does get one star - regardless of how good it is. Don't think about it... just zip through the photos fast as you can - One Star or Not.

Now filter out the zeros and delete them. Now do it again, but this time simply rate them as whether it's worth spending any time on them or not. Don't think about it... just zip through. Worth spending any time on this photo? Yes - 2 stars, No - leave it at 1 star. What you do with these single starred photos depends on your level of pack-rat-ness. Some will delete, and some will keep.

Repeat the process to rank them up to 3 stars. However now you may want to spend a little bit of time with some of them. Zoom in to see if the focus is sharp if you're not sure. Check the histogram to see if there's enough data to work with. Don't do any editing yet.... You're just deciding whether a photo is worth spending time on. You will also have a good sense of what photos you do have. If you have lots of photos of one group of people, you can be tougher on the ratings... you don't need 12 nearly identical photos. If you only have on photos of someone, you may automatically rank it higher even if the quality isn't there just because it's unique.

The first 2 rankings - that is 0 to 1, and then 1 to 2 shouldn't take you more than a few minutes... depending on the quantity. The point is to not think about the photos - to make snap judgements. If you're in doubt, give it the star and see how it does on the next pass. If you are disciplined you can very quickly and easier winnow the collection down to a manageable level.

Modify, of course, to suit your workflow.

conamor said:

I definatly love the discussion here

I have a question. When I takepictures, I take hundreds of photos for an event. I store them in Aperture but then after I look at the project, I have so many pictures that are similar but I am not able to delete them even if they are close. I find that I am deleting memories... The thing is that my library is now 250GB...

Any input on that? Should I say to myself that I have to delete them? They look the same, I suppose I keep the best shot..?

Click to expand...

Storage is free. I only delete the total crap.

I use a rating system similar to snberk103. How I get to the final result does change sometime.

Roughly speaking... if something is good enough to be in a slide show... it final rating is generally 3 stars. If it is good enough to be in a photo book... it is 4 stars. If there is something unique in the picture (maybe a particular person)... but is otherwise not great then it gets 2 stars. 1 star is for photos that are not great, nor have any special attributes. I could delete them... but why? I may find something in them at a future point.

I never rate anything 5 stars... unless it has gone through post... and then only if I consider it one of my prize shots.

Once you have done that... you can set Aperture to only display photos of certain quality... such as 3stars and above. That way you are not wasting time looking at the crap unless you choose to.

Once you have done this... it is trivial to create collections of photos using smart albums. They take no space, and are created instantly. So for example... I can create a slide show for "all pictures, 3stars or greater, taken on the Oregon coast, at any time, with at least 1 family member or friend"... and then have it playing on my Apple TV in seconds.

/Jim

Yeah, storage is so cheap why not move all the semi-unwanteds to another disk?

Many will recommend that you use one Aperture library or LR catalog, but I like to put aside a bunch of stuff into an "archive" library/catalog and just sort of leave it. That way I don't get hits on photos I don't care about with keyword searches, and have fewer collections, etc. But if I ever need to I can go there. I've had to access some bad photos, eg, not for the image but for the metadata on occasion. And back in the day I used to toss extras from series of bracketed shots, but now with HDR being available on even iPhones I'm glad I kept a bunch of those over/underexposed shots.

And another way to cull is to do it on the camera itself. You can't always tell, I grant you, but some obvious duds can be weeded out. This is where newer cameras with wifi and connections to HDTVs can be helpful. I also throw a bunch out when I add keywords; on the road I use the iPad for that mostly.