Comments on: Should You Delete Your Bad Photos in Lightroom?

By: Yolanda

Yolanda — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 19:35:01 +0000

I really need to do this.. eventually. Right now I have all together and only separate by using flags ‍ Great tips here, thanks!

By: Gunslingor

Gunslingor — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 23:56:49 +0000

Yeah, finally good solutions… now they just need to make keywording more practical. I delete the bad ones unless they have a nostalgic purpose or gps location i want to remember, which brings up something else I’ve been wondering, how the heck do you manage photos you didn’t take but are important, scans of old family negatives and such, how to separate best? I also delete duplicates, and bracketing… gotta make a decision eventually.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 20 May 2021 06:40:12 +0000

Scott Kelby writes:
“…back then you never, ever threw away the negatives no matter what, even if they weren’t keepers. You just didn’t do it. The negative were ‘sacred.’”

The other thing was that when you developed your negs (or got them back from the lab), they usually came in strips of (X), so that made it more difficult to get rid of the photographs of the inside of your lens cap. And I don’t know of anyone who cut their negs into individual frames.

Either way, I also keep most of my files.

By: Sebastian Weindel

Sebastian Weindel — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 09:50:44 +0000

Damn it took me 4 years to finally develop a good way to organize my files. My solution: I don’t delete but copy all the keepers to a new harddrive within a seperate LRKAT. But I guess theres no real royal road

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 13:49:40 +0000

I follow the same regimen as Scott’s current process – deleting only the obviously ‘bad’ shots. But as Jesper mentioned, my views on the ‘non-keepers’ may change over time. I’ve had several instances of looking back over photos that didn’t make the cut four or five years ago and thinking “I can use that.” In part, it’s because my skills with Lightroom editing and with Photoshop have improved over the years, so a photo that looked hopeless five years ago can be a candidate for ‘improvement’ now.

By: ButchM

ButchM — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 13:20:00 +0000

I’m an “Old School” photographer that shot film for nearly twice as long as digital … been doing the latter for well over two decades now … Any photo that does not have any redeemable market or personal value gets deleted. Just like I trash used tissues. That said, the threshold for what is deemed as a “keeper” is a purely subjective and very personal topic that you must determine for yourself.

By: marc labro

marc labro — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 03:56:42 +0000

hello,
i do the same and my wife, not LR user, becomes crazy searching a picture of our children in thousands of pictures, even the oil bottles i used to test flashes… :-).
I often come back to 2015… jpg or raw pictures which were not very nice but had some potential and retouch them now with lightroom presets or LUTs and Luminar AI + templates. Results are awesome. I have also improved my skills removing unwanted elements or making better selections so they have a new life 🙂
cmoud storage is “cheap” but i pay in belgium 59 euros to VOO (catv coax) (no fiber in my country) to have 100Mbps downstream and 6Mbps upstream (79 euros if i switch to 400/20Mbps) so backuping on dropbox… is quite tedious so all “mobile-cloud” are not for me. I am investigating Synology NAS 2x4TB instead (700 euros).
marc

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 19:06:13 +0000

I took a photo a few years ago and it was a very important photo to the subject. However, it was very bright outside and i could not see the focus point. Unfortunately, the lens was in MF and it focused on the fence 150 yards behind them. Completed pout of focus. Every time I would pass but it in my LR filmstrip, the bothered me, so I eventually deleted them. A month ago, I saw that there is new AI that can focus an out-of-focus shot. UGH!!!!

By: Rick Grant

Rick Grant — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 16:43:02 +0000

Thanks for this post.

I have suffered much angst since my switch to digital many years ago now. I just cannot drop the feeling of deep sacrilege if I delete anything that is not a vivid and obvious error.

I thought I was alone with this; a feeling that deep culling was shameful and disrespectful. So, I am much relieved that I am not alone.

Having said that. It occurred to me while reading the post and thinking about my situation that there might be a way out. I am going to play with the concept of exporting or transferring unrated, non-flagged, etc images to a “back of the closet” library. I wouldn’t and couldn’t do it all at once, but over a period of weeks in odd moments when I have time to mess around in LR with no specific purpose, I could start marking stuff for the shoebox at the back of the closet.

By: John Kalish

John Kalish — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:52:35 +0000

Yes!!! Thank you. Good old habits are hard to break, and shouldn’t necessarily be broken.