Don't Be A Digital Hoarder

Here are a few tips on dealing with something that can be difficult for some people to do - deleting photos.

Violets from a walk in a local park.

In the age of high-speed digital cameras and huge memory cards, it's easy to make several hundred photos in a day.  This is especially true when visiting a place rich with photo opportunities, such as a National Park.  It can be true when just going for a walk with your camera.  Sometimes when I load the photos on my computer I will have an overwhelming number to deal with.  Here's what I do to manage those.

Sandhill Cranes from Hiwassee, TN.

1. I use Adobe Lightroom to manage all my photos on my home computer. First thing I do after loading the day's photos is to quickly go through and mark the obvious duds as rejects, then delete them.  There is nothing special about how Lightroom does this. Other software tools allow you to quickly get rid of the duds.  The important thing is to get rid of those bad photos.
2. I find I want to pick a few photos to quickly edit and share online.  There is nothing wrong with this, as long as I don't stop there, leaving a lot of abandoned digital images on my computer.
3. Wait a few days then go through the photos again, picking out some more favorites to edit and more importantly, deleting more.  I always have lots of photos that are just so-so that I will probably never touch.  My camera will shoot 11 frames a second on high-speed mode so I find I also have many images of the same thing.  I use the Lightroom compare feature to cull those down to one or two to keep.
4. The final step is one I don't always do but can be the most important.  I will go back to the photos several months later and go through them again.  At this point, I will have several that I edited, and some of those are marked as my picks or favorites.  I want to be aggressive here, deleting the majority of those unedited photos.  Sometimes I'll find a photo that I hadn't edited that turns out to be a keeper, like the two in this post.  Most of the time I find I still have a lot of photos not worth keeping.  It is this final step where I do the most clean up.  When we come back from a photo outing we are excited about our photos and don't want to delete them.  It's amazing how much easier it is to get rid of them a few months later. This morning I went through just three photo outings and deleted 549 images.  

Like a closet or garage, it's easy to let digital images get cluttered on your computer.  Be aggressive and don't become a digital hoarder. 

What If You Lost All Your Digital Photos?

Hey photographers, this question is for you.  Where are your photos stored?  Are they all on a single computer?  Are they backed up?  Where are the backups stored?  What if you lost them all?

Our neighbor's house burned a couple weeks ago.  Thanks to a heroic neighbor, they all got out safely.  However, their house and contents didn't fare as well.  A demolition crew is currently tearing down the house and piling everything in large construction dumpsters to be hauled off.  By this time next year, they will be back in a brand new home, with new furniture, clothes, dishes, TVs, computers, etc.  All the material things can be replaced.  What about the digital things that were in the house?  Computers and hard drives don't hold up very well to fire and water.

If you had a disaster in your home or office, how would your digital images fare?  Would they be gone forever?  Unless you have backup copies somewhere else then fires, floods, broken pipes, etc. can wipe out your images and local backup copies.

I have all my digital image files on a Network Storage System (NAS) with RAID drives where they are protected from failure of the hard drives.  Other disks are backed up every night.  Sounds pretty safe, but all those copies are in one location.  Recent events have gotten me thinking of off-site backups. My plan is to buy some external hard drives, copy all my important files to them and store them somewhere outside our home.   This solution is only as good as my diligence in keeping the off-site copies up to date.

I've looked into backing up my files to the cloud.  The problem is my internet connection is limited to  3 Mbps upload speed. It would take about a month to upload my images to the cloud.  Then, every time I come home from a trip I would have to upload a thousand or more images.  This doesn't sound sustainable.

What are your solutions for protecting your digital image files from disaster?