Culling website photos and archiving the old ones

<p>I am an avid amateur photographer. I have and website, a blog. I am on Facebook, Google+, 500px. I subscribe to Kelbytraining and Photo.net. I, mostly, sell my work locally. Recently I got an email from someone who had seen one of my photos in Google/Images. He wanted to purchase the rights for a website. Awesome. The power of the web.<br>

However, this is not my question. I have read that to maintain your website you should present maybe 20 or so of your best works per section and cull the ones that are not as high a quality. This makes sense.<br>

But my question is this, when culling your images, what do you do with your other images? How do you archive them? As an example, the image the person wanted for his website would probably be one that I might cull in the future. If I remove the image from my website, then the link from search engine will be broken. In this case, no sale.<br>

So what do other photographers do with the images that no longer appear on their website, yet they still want others to have exposure to? I have not read or seen any information on this issue, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.</p><div>[ATTACH=full]729089[/ATTACH]</div>

<p>I know of many photographers who present only a limited, carefully curated selection of photos on their professional websites, but also use Flickr, Tumblr and other casual sites to post everything else: stuff that doesn't quite fit their pro sites, but which are good photos; and often just their personal snapshots and photo blogs.</p>

<p>Regarding keeping photos with old links intact on your site, but more or less hidden, that's a great question - I'd like to learn some tips as well.</p>

<p>For example, with photo.net I can move photos freely between my public and hidden folders without breaking links. I can still link to photos in the hidden folders and present those photos in discussion forum threads to share techniques or to just participate in photo sharing threads. Some photo hosting sites I've tried don't work that way - when I moved the photo the link broke.</p>

<p>Yea, the images that appear in a Google search are currently linked to my website. So what happens to those images which will still be in the Google Search but no longer found on my site? I am sure I am not the only one with the question. Just don't know the answer yet. I have a Flickr account but don't really use it because I tend to use 500px. Hopefully more folks will chime in with their answers.</p>

 

If it's just a few pics, you could store them somewhere else like Flickr or even a separate directory on your own site, and then setup a URL

redirect for them in your htaccess file that points to where they are. But, that gets impossibly cumbersome pretty quickly.

 

On the other hand, you may want to ask yourself if it's really that critical. Websites are rearranged and redesigned all the time. Sometimes

you can just leave images and galleries where they are, and simply remove them from the menu system. That way, they are still available if

someone happens to be led there by a search on Google or whatever.

 

Personally, I would be more inclined to just ignore the experts who give a number of photos you should not exceed.

<p>Thanks for your info though I manage my site, I did not develop it and am not a developer. So ease of management is also critical. I want to spend time taking and editing photos and not excess time managing the site. Do you folks have sites and what do you do with your older images?</p>

<p>I store all of my photos on hard drives whether they are published to the web or not. If I remove a photo from my website, I don't need to "archive" it. It's already on my hard drives.</p>

<p>If it's not on my website or blog, I don't "want others to have exposure to" it. At least, not at the moment.</p>

<p>Of course, clients and friends upload photos that I take of them. I have no control over that. They may do as they please.</p>