Time to Say Goodbye – to those photos
It's a New Year and therefore I tend to look for ways to do house cleaning. I look for ways to improve my workflow and I look for ways to not make the same mistakes as the year before. I recently looked at one of my Lightroom Catalogs. It's my Portrait/Model catalog. I started doing serious portrait photography back in in 2006 and my current catalog has over 30,000 photos in it!
How I ended up with 30,000+ Photos?
When I do a photo shoot I can shoot anywhere from 100 to 800 photos. My average is around 300. So here's what happens in my current workflow: Let's say I shoot 500 shots. I then go home and eliminate 200 right off the bat. Those 200 go in the trash immediately. They are the eyes closed, flash didn't fire, bad expression kinda shots. Now I go through and pick out a few of my favorites. Next I export a web gallery, post it and send the URL to the client/model. He/she picks out the agreed upon number of shots (let's say 10) that I then retouch and deliver the final shots to them. That leaves 280-290 shots that I didn't want and that the client/model didn't want. Multiply this number times all my shoots in the past three years and you arrive at the 30,000+ number.
But what if?
The reason it's so hard to hit the delete button on these shots is because we say "but what if the client wants them later?" You know how many times this has happened in 3 years? ZERO! Not one time has a client/model come back and say "hey, you know those shots that were just OK? Yeah the ones that I didn't choose the first time. I'd like those now." It hasn't happened one single time in all of my shooting. My theory is that when they picked their shots, they picked the best ones and anything left would be second best at best. How often do you go back and ask for the second best of anything once you have the best.
It's time to say goodbye!
I've decided that it's time to get rid of these photos. Not only is it time to say goodbye to those shots, but it's time to adjust my workflow so that I'm not faced with this again. So I decided to use one of Lightroom's built-in features that will identify the shots that are candidates to be deleted. Using Lightroom's Smart Collection feature to build a Collection that dynamically updates based on my criteria for shots that can be deleted. Here's how it works:
Rating = none – this means that it's a photo that never got a rating.
Label Color = none – I use color labels to identify client choices. If it doesn't have a label then that means that the client/model didn't want it.
Pick Flag = Unflagged – I didn't flag it as a Pick. So again it didn't stand out to me as I either rate with a Pick flag or 5 star rating for the ones I really like.
File Type is NOT a .PSD – this means that I didn't retouch it. When I retouch my shots in Photoshop CS4 I save them as .PSD files right back into Lightroom. So if's not a .PSD then that means it was never retouched.
Individually none of these are enough of a reason to delete a photo. However, if a photo matches all of the above then most likely it's one of the ones that I didn't want and the client didn't want either. So why keep it?
Exceptions to the rule
Yep, like most rules there are some exceptions to this. The first one that comes to mind is that you are contractually obligated to keep ALL of the shots you took for a period of time. If that's the case, then simply ignore this and keep the shots. The other exception is that you are too weak to pull the trigger. I understand. You just can't do it. OK by me keep your shots and continue to buy more and more hard drive space.
Pulling the trigger
Once you have your Smart Collection built it will dynamically add shots to itself that meet the criteria. What's nice is that you can sort the collection by Capture Date and therefore see your oldest photos at the top. Because it's a Smart Collection you can't actually delete photos from it.
However, you can shift select (or select all) of the images that you want to discard and then click on the All Photographs folder at the top and they will still be selected. Now you can (gasp) hit the delete key. You'll be given the choice of simply removing them from Lightroom or Deleting them from the disk altogether. Don't chicken out now. I know you're probably thinking that you can simply delete them from Lightroom and your problem is solved. Lightroom will be lean and mean! While this is true, you'll now have thousands of photos that are sitting on the hard drive that you'll probably never look at again. What's worse is you'll have no way of knowing which ones are in Lightroom and which ones aren't? So do the right thing! Delete them!
The Bottom Line
Hard drive space is cheap! It sure is and you could always just keep everything "just in case". However, at some point you're going to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of images that will become more and more of an chore to manage! So the choice is yours!
Watch me do it
Here's a video from my latest episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast on exactly how to set this up in Lightroom.
Written by terrywhite. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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