we take entirely too many photos

[mrbigstuff]

I was sorting through the family batch of photos when I was a youngster. The first thing that amazed me is that the color has held up reasonably well and that the photos with white borders look instantly better regardless of composition when compared with borderless. But, the biggest thing that occurred to me is that there are maybe 1000-1500 prints in total, documenting many sides of the family and in multiple locations and spanning probably two decades. How many of you just shot 500 digital pics on your last vacation? I am guessing more than a few. Who the hell is going to edit these things? In addition to leaving our kids tons of household junk (in their opinion, I am sure) we are now leaving them with thousands upon thousands of photos to sort through. It's probably ridiculous to try to get people *not* to take the photos in the first place, but I'm now thinking that I will print some of the best photos and start a "synopsis" version of my kids' time rather than try to make sense of this big mess of digital images in any meaningful way. Maybe even put them in an album.

What is old is new again.




incidentally, my childhood photos are kept in an archival brown paper supermarket bag.

[freeradical]

One of the great things about shooting film, is that it slows you down, especially when you're shooting medium format or larger. It forces you to ask yourself the question: "Why am I taking this picture?" I am amazed when people claim to have shot 1000 pics in one day. Perhaps 10-15 of those pics will be "keepers".

[rgG]

mrbigstuff wrote:
incidentally, my childhood photos are kept in an archival brown paper supermarket bag.

:jest:

I prefer those archival shoe boxes, myself.

[deckeda]

Editing is hard. Self-editing is harder. Well, for me anyway.

With digital it helps to edit ruthlessly and as soon as possible. Deleting from the camera is quicker and leaves less time to second-guess later.

Even so, i have tons of images on computer it would take a long time to properly tag, edit and cull. And so I haven't. And so no one sees them.

A couple years ago I loaded some Sensia into my Elan II. I chose my subjects with some thought, my compositions with even more thought and available light too. Despite very little experience shooting transparencies, all images turned out well and so did the content.

Of course, most things I used to shoot with film back in the day didn't turn out that well. And so I haven't repeated the exercise for fear of jinxing it!

[$tevie]

I have been pondering this problem of "too many photos" for some time. Yes, once a couple of years go by the folder of pics sits there just as full as the day it was downloaded, full of bad shots and total duplicate shots and shots that were taken to later choose the best lighting but no choice was ever made. 8-)

[OWC Jamie]

Ha.
My last vacation was 9GB and that's just the jpegs
( I keep all the RAW copies separate )


I have 3 shoe boxes of prints and negatives that I'm never going to find the time to digitize.


Plus I got some of Mom's that she wanted scanned that I never got to. Thankfully when their house was broken into someone stole all their old film canisters and lousy film and quite a few pics of all us kids because otherwise I would be tasked with that project as well.
None of my brothers or sisters want any of the pics (that didn't get stolen) from when they were kids. Don't even want to look at them.

I don't think kids are gonna fight over our pics - they're gonna toss 'em in the hole with us.

[M>B>]

How many photos do we take a year...

http://hyperallergic.com/48765/how-many-...ke-a-year/

[mikebw]

I just got the counter on my Sony a550 to rollover (10,000 images) after using it for just over 2 years. I will categorically delete anything that is completely unusable, often right in the camera, but after I have copied them onto my computer most of them live on forever. Rating them in Adobe Bridge is a quick and easy way to cull them down, but the lowest or no ranking ones rarely get deleted.

[davester]

What deckeda said. The most important part of the digital photography process is ruthless editing as soon as possible. When I take a series of shots I always look at them immediately on the camera and delete anything that's a duplicate or not an obvious keeper right then and there. Then I usually do another review when I upload them to iPhoto and further cull them. I also try to group them under events and create albums. Typically, less than 10% (probably more like 1%) of the photos I take are keepers.

You're not doing anybody any favors by keeping all of your shots. You're devaluing all of your photos by creating a huge garbage pile with gems hidden by the sheer chaos. I hate it when somebody shows me their vacation pictures where they haven't bothered to edit out the crap. Pure torture!

[ArtP]

Wow.... (from the link above)

They point out that in 2011 there were 140 billion photographs on Facebook, which is … wait for it … 10,000 times larger than the number of photos in the collections of the Library of Congress.