I spent a little time cleaning out iPhoto today. Out of over 15000 pictures spanning many years, I barely managed to eliminate 900. Easiest to eliminate were photos under exposed or blown out. Of the remaining 14000 or so photos, there are lots of near duplicate shots, unflattering photos, irrelevant pictures, and who knows what else. Also remaining are pictures that I have since post-processed and have saved elsewhere on my computer.
I must conclude I am a photo hoarder.
I spent some time watching Hoarders this week. It motivated me to do my bi-annual house purge and I have plenty of household donations that are getting picked up. Bags of trash were picked up by the garbage men. So why can't I delete photos from my computer?
I can't delete photos anymore, either! I tried to get in the habit of deleting the originals after I was satisfied with my post-processing, and just keeping the edited copies. HUGE mistake! I've learned a lot more about editing since I started, and there are a few photos I'd love to re-process, but I can't because I stupidly deleted the original. Boooooo!
oh yes I'm the same way....I only started taking a bajillion pictures THIS year...and holy cow are there a ton....not only do I just dont have the time or motivation to go through and delete...a lot of them I dont WANT to delete...I just cant do it! lol
For me, I think it kind of matters. Recently, when I had to look for a specific picture from two years ago, it was kind of frustrating to scroll through a lot of junky photos and try to locate it. I nearly pulled my hair out.
I started using photoshop elements. As soon as I add pictures, I put them in an album and move them into keyword folders. It was a pain to go back through about 8,000 pictures and sort them, but now I can find just about any picture by project, person or event. It means I can be a photo hoarder and be proud of it.
Now I all I need to do is add all those boxes of negatives I have stashed in the closet. Talk about hoarding.
I don't have every photo that I have taken, but I have over 19K images in PSOrganizer and I'm in the process of scanning all the slides that I have kept over the years. Talk about "Why did I take that?" Better question is "where is that?"
Going Digital has just added to the problem as now, I don't worry about having to get the pictures processed before I can see them. Between my wife and I, we have taken over 3K photos on each of our trips to Yellowstone over the past couple of years. Yipes!!
Rachel, everywhere in life I am about decluttering. I mean I literally try to have as little stuff as possible. With pictures and music: it's impossible. I hoard, hoard, hoard and cannot say goodbye. What does it mean? I think it means the pictures mean something to you and that is why they are allowed to stay.
I can't even delete my bad ones LOL. I have boxes and boxes of hard copy photos, even the bad ones, and I haven't ever counted my digital photos but I have over 250gb on my 1tb hard drive, just pictures.
I delete the rubbish immediately when I upload them, then all my pictures get put into a photo for the current year and named accordingly. So at the moment, they're following the 2010xxx series, with xxx being the next numbers in the line. This means as long as I know the year and event was, I can skim through the thumnails knowing everything is in chronological order. Any edited photos get an "a" added to the name so I know it's the same photo. But yes, I have WAY too many photos. I keep thinking I should go back and look at some older ones and maybe delete some...
Right now, in my iPhoto, I have 5,961 pictures- not including the 200 I have yet to upload from my camera.
The sad part is, is that I have nearly 6K pictures AFTER I've gone through and cut down the, underexposed, unflattering, blurry pictures.
I'm definitely going to invest in an external hard drive soon just so I don't loose all of these bad boys!
You know, I guess I would consider myself a photo hoarder too. But the only thing is, I'm SUCH an organized person that they are in a ton of folders. I mean, you can organize them by year, date, description(portrait, nature, whatever). I will let them sit on my computer for awhile, then go through them and organize. They wind up much easier to find and I don't have to delete them. The only thing is finding time to actually go through them. But years later, I'm very happy I started doing it.
I believe I am a deleter!! Does that word exist?
If I don't smile when I see a picture it is garbage!
I might offer my clean up sevices to some of you, rsss...
I generally don't delete off the camera but do do a bit of culling on the computer. Sometimes a 'mistake' can turn out quite interesting, like this shot of mine which was seriously over exposed with terrible camera shake.
It's now become inspiration for an acrylic painting.
I am a hoarder too- yet I hoard on snapfish and not on my computer :) Once I upload and edit, I then upload to snapfish and only keep about one month's worth of pics on my computer :)
For months I've been meaning to clear my photos off my hard drive and get them organized onto disks separated by dates. This way when I want a certain time period I can just pop that disk into the computer. My poor Mac is so slow because of all of the photos I have. Of course I keep putting it off because more urgent things always pop up...
I don't delete much either. Across all my cameras, I have about 90,000 shutter clicks since I started my photo-a-day project, and I have just over 80,000 of them on my external drives.
I also hoard pictures I have two computers with about 5,000 pictures a piece and I refuse to delete pictures off of my camera until after I put them on the computer and after that I still don't like to delete them after my camera.
so it looks like picture hoarding is something of a common factor. I recently got a new laptop and started moving photos across from my old to my network drive and stupidly cleaned out the old one before i copied them across to my new laptop. My network drive died half way through and where I used to have backups, now i dont.
The photos represented the last 7 years of my life - the time i'd spent in the UK and a few years before that so I was pretty sad. But thankfully, after many many weeks i've managed to retrieve the data phew. Now that i'm going through them to see what I need and what I dont, i've come across many photos which are just horrible. So i say, clear out the clutter! saves time backing up which will make you do it more often and hopefully you wont have the same problems I did! :)
@rachel, that is what metadata is for. To help narrow your searches. Plus you might need to consider a better naming convention for your photos to help you identify them. I personally use yymmdd - -###.jpg for example 100604 - Family Picknic - 012.jpg it helps me know what the event was, when it was and then if I add metadata I know pictures that contain my which of my sons or whatever data I want to collect with my photos.
If I take a lot of pictures of a subject I go through them two by two... keeping the better of the two... and keep going until I've just between one and three pictures of any image. Today I moved everything to external hard drive... do that every so often. File them under date and useful identification title so they're easy to relocate... eg... 2010.06.04 Eliot
Yea. I have an account on photobucket, and i started cleaning out the pictures/creations that I didnt like or had any interest in them. Same with on my camera. I have pictures from last summer that I should get rid of.
I have a personal philosophy of "treasure or necessity". If it's not something I NEED, then it has to be something I LOVE. Junk photos just don't fit either category, so out they go. If a photo doesn't 'click' with me, then I delete. I have not regretted this means of organizing yet, whether it's photos or household stuff.
In relation to this, I found this interesting article from 2001 on the perceived threat to the pictorial history record from the move to digital photography.
From the article: Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the historical impact of digital capture. She argues that the use of digital photography in news reporting means we could lose a valuable pictorial record of history.
I'm a real picture hoarder as well. However, since starting my 365 and having to challenge myself to select 1 picture for each day (while I often have MANY more), I am getting better at selecting. So what I do now is that for each day, series or event, I choose a number of to how many photos I want to go down, make my selection match that, and move everything remaining into a subfolder for discards. They don't get lost, but I do get a much more engaging selection per event. And I'm getting better and better at making a critical selection.
I'm definitely a hoarder. Due to 365 I take nearly 100 photos a day and I keep them all. I need to buy a 1 TB hard drive but I haven't done it yet. My computer has 500 GB of memory luckily but it shrinks everyday
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So now I'm afraid to delete anything. Sigh.
Now I all I need to do is add all those boxes of negatives I have stashed in the closet. Talk about hoarding.
Going Digital has just added to the problem as now, I don't worry about having to get the pictures processed before I can see them. Between my wife and I, we have taken over 3K photos on each of our trips to Yellowstone over the past couple of years. Yipes!!
Yes, I confess, I am a picture hoarder!
Right now, in my iPhoto, I have 5,961 pictures- not including the 200 I have yet to upload from my camera.
The sad part is, is that I have nearly 6K pictures AFTER I've gone through and cut down the, underexposed, unflattering, blurry pictures.
I'm definitely going to invest in an external hard drive soon just so I don't loose all of these bad boys!
If I don't smile when I see a picture it is garbage!
I might offer my clean up sevices to some of you, rsss...
:-P
It's now become inspiration for an acrylic painting.
The photos represented the last 7 years of my life - the time i'd spent in the UK and a few years before that so I was pretty sad. But thankfully, after many many weeks i've managed to retrieve the data phew. Now that i'm going through them to see what I need and what I dont, i've come across many photos which are just horrible. So i say, clear out the clutter! saves time backing up which will make you do it more often and hopefully you wont have the same problems I did! :)
did a quick google search
metadata tutorial
Digital photos 'endanger the past'
From the article: Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the historical impact of digital capture. She argues that the use of digital photography in news reporting means we could lose a valuable pictorial record of history.