How many percentage of pictures do you keep ?

I'm sure y'all have taken lots lots of pics. I only keep like 20%. How about y'all ?

 

John

I keep probably 90% but print maybe 2%.

I have ots of spare, duplicate storage.

 

I only delete forever the crap shots: OOF or WAY over or under exposed, and the blurry.

 

Thus I keep 98.5%. And like Beau, print just 1.8%.

I kind of mentally sort them into categories...

 

After taking a lot of photos (without deleting any yet)

I put them into groups...

 

Terrible (blurry, badly exposed, no focus point...)

Okay (good subject but a little blurry, needs a little editing...)

Good (will try edit to make it more interesting, but not something too good...)

Great (crisp sharp, good subject, maybe will do more editing)

 

Then I like to delete all the TERRIBLE pictures, keep some OKAY pictures if they have a

valuable subject, keep the GOOD pictures, and work more with the GREAT pictures.

About 99%. I only delete the totally retarded ones like pictures of the inside of my bag,

feet or extreme bloopers. Out of a 100 images I probably immediately print 1 or 2 and

toss in a small frame or album. About the same number get posted on my website. Maybe

one outta a 1000 gets printed at 8 x 12 or larger, matted and framed. The rest are not necessarily bad--most are decent and many are excellent--but I tend to value them more

several years down the road. I'm still finding images I shot years ago, was bored of the

subject so let them set and rediscovered them and printed. It would be silly to delete

pictures unless totally crap. You may need a scenic for stock or a picture of Uncle Joe for

his funeral.

 

With that said, I shoot digital like I shot film: carefully considered and composed. I'm lucky

to shoot 2500 images in a year. Oddly, I shot about the same amount of chromes--70

rolls--yearly during the 90s and up until I switched to mainly digital in 2003. I couldn't

imagine even looking at 10,000 or more images some people claim to shoot. The post-

processing would be mind numbing. I still have 30 years of chromes and negs to wade

through. I recently sold a lighthouse image to the USPS I didn't give rat's tail about. I

actually scanned a 1992 chrome. Glad I didn't toss it. It's the cover for the 2007 Commemorative-Stamp-Yearbook.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Commemorative-Stamp-Yearbook-Postal-

Service/dp/0061236853

http://www.amazon.com/Commemorative-Stamp-Yearbook-Postal-Service/dp/0061236853

I keep about 100 images per year in RAW format. I keep bit more in JPG that I keep on the website. Rest I delete.

Once I download my pics, I start looking on how crisp the pics are, then I look if it has decent composition on the pic (most of the time I'm in a hurry since I took most pics during group bus tours :-) ).

 

John

I assume by "keep" you mean ones you don't outright delete. I only toss the obvious bloopers, like blank images or those of my shoe. For December, for which I have yet to flush the rejects, that added up to 1.94%. Disk storage is so inexpensive that making any kind of higher level judgment of what to keep or delete is not a worthwhile use of my time. Besides, as previously mentioned, you never know what might have value in the future.

Keep means you like the picture and wouldn't be afraid to post it to public site like photo.net or Flickr.com :-). Maybe "keepers" will be a better term.

 

 

My apology if my pics cause y'all headache.

 

John

I have never intentionally destroyed a Negative or Positive nor deleted a Digital Image I have taken.

 

Like others, I have several that end up `on the cutting room floor`, but they are all in `storage`.

 

The `how many do I print question has a much different answer.`

 

Professionally about 70% to 80% get printed, at least to corrected proofs: For my own fun: about 2% to 5 %, perhaps less so with my digital gear: 1.5%

 

WW

Interesting question that isn't easy to answer. The shots from my daughter's last birthday were all keepers 100%. I've also had assignments where I never really produced anything that I personally liked, so I guess the answer in those cases is 0%. In conclusion, my answer is somewhere between 0% and 100% ;).

95% or greater - and still shooting film

Like Ken and Puppy, I'll only ditch the wildly bad shots and will just stick the others on a CD/DVD and archive them.

 

Last August, I took about 1.5k at a polo tournament and about 30 were published in Polo Times; that's ~0.02%.

 

On my last shoot, the light wasn't great so none of the 150-200 shots were good enough. I've called them studies and posted low resolution images on flickr where the client can see them. But that was 0% keepers.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjmeade/sets/72157603601925507/detail/

Digital images ... I keep between 30% and 50% ... usually more on the 30% side. Prints are made of less than 5% (of the remaining images).

 

Slides ... I usually keep about 75%. (No prints are made ... with a few exceptions).

Before this year, kept 99.9% of my pictures. Like Johnson D, the ones of my kids and family are 100% keepers. My hobby stuff, (I say hobby because I have yet to sell a photo), I delete the really bad ones( accidental 3sec exposures and the like)

 

This year I am going to make an attempt of cleaning up my stuff fairly quickly. I shoot all RAW all the time, so now I need to decide if I should keep the raw's of the family or just convert the so so's to jpg and kiss the RAW goodbye

 

And as Johnson D said as well, storage is really cheap. Keep everything until you cant afford a new set of hard drives

I used to keep everything I shot; then a couple years later when going back through my

old photos I'd wonder just why I kept all those shots that suck and that I'll never look at

again. I started to get a lot more ruthless with my editing.

 

Let's see, do I really need 5 nearly identical shots of the same thing? Or should I just pick

the one that's the best?

 

Sure, hard drive space is cheap but my time isn't and I hate having to sort through

thousands of worthless shots for the one that I want.

 

I don't know what percentage of shots I keep and it depends a bit on the subject matter;

but I'd guess I'd toss between 80-90% of them overall. Of course lots of those are just

messing around and experimenting with new things too.

 

The other day I went to a cattle sorting competition and took about 250 shots. After I got

done editing I was down to about 40, and really, there are a good number of those I could

weed out too.

 

Alan

I only get one or two keepers per 100, but I don't delete anything. Just clogging up my hard drive. My keepers, I make jpgs and save to a special directory. I use them for wallpaper and change the view frequently. I show them to people who act interested. and post a few.

[[sure, hard drive space is cheap but my time isn't and I hate having to sort through thousands of worthless shots for the one that I want.]]

 

Like Alan, I used to keep almost everything that I shot digitally. But I'm starting to become more ruthless with my editing, especially with RAW files. Storage may be cheap but it's still an additional cost to keep adding hard drives.

 

I print very little and that's something I'm hoping to change in 2008. I need more prints in my house.

Digital I keep about 2-3%..film about 10%.

andy

On my first pass at the RAW I make a firm decision and immediately delete anything I judge useless.

 

 

That step is very important to me, and while I often wonder why I took some of these in the first place I've never wished I could have any of those back.

 

If I take 100 Raw, maybe 30 fit this category and are gone forever.

 

That leaves 70. Of those, I may post-process about 50 with the other 20 being usually 'semi-dups'--the same scene but different exposure or DOF, which I may or may not decide to process later. So out of 100 raw pictures I'll make maybe 50 jpegs in my digital viewing album, but of those 50 maybe 1 or 2 are really worth printing and going onto my 'favorites' paper album or on my wall.

--Jim

wait, wait, wait...you can PRINT digital images?

Likewise I keep all but print few. Which raises a question: Does everyone actually index all those images they keep, so they can find them again?

I keep most of my images apart from the OOF, badly exposed ones and the odd shot of my feet or the wall. I print quite a few up to 8x10 then I give them away to relatives or put them in a draw. A few go in frames on the wall. I often go back to folders and rediscover images that I never printed for one reason or another and sometimes I reprint an image to see how it would look another way. For me the print is the final product so I do like to make prints.

I just keep them as date sorted when I download using DPP. If 100% view doesn't look decently crisp then that pic is pretty much over :-).