What do you delete ?

My hard-drive's are getting full, so I had a hard look at what I actually save and what I need to save.

Cleaned out about 500GB from one of my back-up drives today, I have the habit of saving everything I shoot, but going through it, 70% are the ' 5 bracket' shots. This was just a habit I got into, but I am now more selective and don't bracket so much.

I just need to go through 5TB now, and sort that out

Did find this gem though, from the Royal Highland Show

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link

I delete at least 60% of the images taken at a guess and all camera jpegs once the raw file has been processed and a jpeg saved.

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K10D, K5 plus plenty of clueless enthusiasm.

My Flickr site link

I delete nothing. Sometimes I go back and look at images and they are much better than I thought at the time. maybe first time around I'm not in the mood for them, and later I am.

Any image, even a blurred one, just might have a use at some point in a composite image. Once deleted, that choice is no longer there.

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Best regards, John

My photos fall into two categories - records of family events and work-related documentation, and secondly everything else. The former get edited to remove images of poor technical quality, say about 20%, and of the latter I only keep what I can use for paintings and maybe worthy in their own right so probably 60-70% gets deleted. I don't have much interest in extensive post-processing so if the original isn't nearly there it goes.

I go through the RAWs on the card while it's in the card reader, delete blurred images and the not so good.
Every so often as I review my libraries, I'll come across some not worth keeping, so they go too.
I'm not a 'what if' kind of guy - I don't like clutter.

Exactly the same here. Storage prices have come down in real terms and I always back up to two hard drives (just in case!). Years later, that poor image may be just what you need to combine with something else, or may remind you to go back to a location - or try something again.