Deleters, be proud!

Since I got Lightroom 2 this week, I've been working on setting up a good organizational system for all my photos.

Now obviously, not every photo it a keeper. But I NEVER used to delete them.
I started shooting in RAW (was waiting for Lightroom) and it's SO MUCH EASIER to view them and see if they are worth keeping or not! So I'm deleting a TON of the blurry or otherwise poor photos that I would normally just keep out of laziness.

It's a small step in the right direction, but a step nonetheless!! :thumbup:

wooooooooooo for deleting LOL

Loveeee deleting!

woo hoo! I've been doing that lately too! AS I browse a gallery..it's delete the blurry or crappy ones

I've been trying to do that too the last couple of weeks. When I reached 2,000+ pics in Lightroom, I decided it was time. LOL

I read a photography article written by a professional photographer and that was one of the things he said about photography is that he deletes about 1/2 if not more of his photographs. That way he really only keeps the really great ones. I do delete alot but they usually get deleted before I even upload. I put my card into the computer and right click on one to preveiw them. I go through the whole lot and any that dont look ok get deleted then I upload. Saves me from having to go through them later

BrodoNY0123 said:

Since I got Lightroom 2 this week, I've been working on setting up a good organizational system for all my photos.

Now obviously, not every photo it a keeper. But I NEVER used to delete them.
I started shooting in RAW (was waiting for Lightroom) and it's SO MUCH EASIER to view them and see if they are worth keeping or not! So I'm deleting a TON of the blurry or otherwise poor photos that I would normally just keep out of laziness.

It's a small step in the right direction, but a step nonetheless!! :thumbup:

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LR is totally gonna help my organization and photography this year. I am PUMPED!

with doin the 365 project last year & just my general photographs I took over 5000 photos in 2008. Once I get the last of Decembers 365's edited I am going back through the year and deleting the heck out of that mountain. I'm hoping to stay on top of it this year so it doens't get as bad as it did this time.

LR is nice because if you are undecided about a photo you can quickly run a couple filters & if it still looks off you know it's beyond help and can delete it in good conscious

I really need to work on this. Sometimes I will go to scrap photos of the kids at the park or something and I'll have 200+ pictures to choose from. It's crazy.

Yay for deleting! I love deleting photos. I let them build up for a while then spend an evening organizing and purging. Feels so good to get rid of them! I typically back up to CD while they're building up, so I have even the bad ones on CD.

Go Col!

I love deleting!

Good on 'ya!
Isn't lightroom genius!!?

Go you!! Working on this a bit myself here today....can't believe the stuff I've kept for so long...yikes!

YEAH, Col!!!!!

I really need to do this. I only delete the obviously BAD photos (unrecognizable image...blurry beyond recognition). But, do I really need 50 shots of the kids playing swords for the 50th time in their life? LMAO! But, it is so hard for me to delete.

I am a fairly good deleter ... but not great. How does Lightroom help you with this? I don't understand what RAW is. Can someone teach me?

I'm a deleter too! Mostly because I only have so much room on my hard drive and RAW files are so huge! And I love that same feature in LR, where you can decide to just delete the photo from the library or take it completely off your HD. I just import everything and then decide which ones to keep from there - easy peasy!

Yay for deleting!

But still I take way to many pics!! We went to the zoo last Friday and I took 98 photos, I deleted them down to 54, but still 50 freeking four!!! What am I going to do with those!! I thought once about not taking the camera just for this reason! I know I can't possibly scrap them all, but if I don't scrap them, then will I need them at all? Will I even ever look at them again? What to do?!! What to do??

MelindaH said:

I am a fairly good deleter ... but not great. How does Lightroom help you with this? I don't understand what RAW is. Can someone teach me?

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RAW is a different format that pictures can be taken in on DSLR's. If you shoot in jpg mode (as most point and shoots, and you can with DSLR's as well) the camera already automatically does some post processing on the image before it writes it to your memory card. Sometimes, you don't WANT it to do that, so you can shoot in RAW mode and do everything yourself. It's also easier to correct things (such as exposure issues, white balances issues) on a RAW photo.

Lightroom will help me, because now that I'm shooting RAW (T, I import as DNG's, is that what you do?? I don't want the XMP sidecar files adding even more space to the photos.) I HAVE to use Lightroom (or adobe camera raw) to import them and edit and play with them. Lightroom makes it 9043894038290432 times easier to look at each and every photo at a large screen size, and decide if I want to keep it or not. If not, I hit the "delete" button and can delete it from my EHD right then and there. Before I would just dump them all in a folder on my EHD, and use what I wanted but keep everything. It was just easier to keep them all than to open the photos, decide if I liked them, find them on my EHD, and delete them.

Sprauncey, it's a judgement call. You don't really have 54 favorites from that zoo trip, right? So go through and pick 12 or 18 or 24 or however many you're comfortable with, and get rid of hte rest. Or burn them to a dvd or something. For example, you don't need 12 photos in a series of the kids eating ice cream all messy. You need 1 for each kid and maybe a group shot. The rest are just redundant!

I love Lightroom for this very reason, it makes it SO much easier to compare photos and only keep the ones that you really love. Not that I've been doing a great job of that with the 60GB of photos that seem to have taken over my computer. But it's definitely one of my goals for this next year, the RAW files just take up way too much space to keep them all!

Lynnette, do you import them as RAW files? I import them as DNG's instead (according to Kelby, it saves about 20% over RAW, not counting the XMP sidecar files that get bigger with every change you make to the photo).

Hmm, I'm not sure? How would I know?

Nettio said:

Hmm, I'm not sure? How would I know?

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When you import into lightroom, which option do you pick? Lol!
I choose the copy as Digital Negative and add to catalog, but you can just copy them in as RAW (which you are unless you tell it to copy as DNG's, lol). DNG's write all info to the metadata but the metadata stays within the file. RAW doesn't support metadata (or at least this is my understanding of the system) so it writes a second file called an XMP sidecar file that holds all the metadata.

Ok I've got it now, somehow I missed the DNG option when I was looking at the import settings.

I import everything as RAW files but I write my metadata directly to the catalog (this is the default behavior) so I don't have all those annoying XMP files everywhere. I'm not really sure what the advantage of having all those files is if I only view my photos through Lightroom anyway. Anyone know? I almost always edit my photos in Photoshop after Lightroom so I usually save a tiff file as my finished photo anyway.

I did read a little about the dng files and it seems with Canon cameras, there's already some compression to the RAW file so saving to dng doesn't save you all that much space. It seems a lot of people are using it to archive their files since it's an open format but I don't know if I'm all that concerned about that at this point. But maybe I'm just missing something.