Editing....

[inkjunkie]

New to using Lightroom so I am a bit slow. Luckily most of my images I am pretty happy with, right out of the camera.

I have right around 1000 images sitting, waiting. I have not culled most of them yet, which leads me to my question.

Bearing in mind I am just a hobbyist. RIght now these photos are just for us, some will be posted on Instagram & Facebook.

I have a lot of them that are not exactly the best photos. Some because my dog may have looked away at just the right moment. SOme because I often just walk around and take random images. Which leads me to my problem. Many of these photos should simply be deleted. But I just can't bring myself to doing so. How do you folks deal with photos that just aren't worth editing but you don't want to delete them? Do you just export them to a folder on a removable device?

In a short while drag racing season will be starting. The track owner has asked me to be track side with my camera. He wants to have more of a social media presence, in particular would like some videos in addition to photos. My inability to delete less than stellar photos is going to create a mountain of digitall data for me to have to dig my way thru. I think there is going to be 10 points races next year, if I am not careful I will still be working on the second of those races when the season ends

[kvbarkley]

You probably want to set up a rating system so that really good ones get  5 stars, and bad ones you just don't want to throw away get 1 star. I think lightroom has flags and stars.

[cicopo]

it's all about finding a workflow that works for YOU. I shoot radio control flying, and roughly 30,000 images a season. I usually know what ones I want from a shoot because I saw the exact image as it was shot even though it was in a burst of photos. I shoot large fine jpg + RAW but rarely need the RAW for the on line event album which I usually have on line by Wed AM. I use the now abandoned but still available program Google used to support (Picasa) to pick & do most of my editing. I try hard to limit things to between 5 to 10 photos of each plane flown & they need to be interesting & in sharp focus. If a pilot flies I want that plane in the event album whether it's an expensive giant scale aircraft of cheap off the shelf foamy. The organizers & pilots like that & the albums bring out more pilots knowing they will be a part of the album.

To choose the photos i'll use i run a slideshow, stopping at a good photo, then I do a quick edit (including cropping it) & put it in the "hold" tray. When I get starry eyed I export those picks to a new album for a final edit or maybe to be deleted because I have found a better photo later in the picking process. I do this until i've gone through the flying photos once. Next I run another slide show of the photos I've picked, deleting as necessary, & sometimes forcing me to go back & add because I'm short of the 5 I want. When happy with my first set of edits I do a final edit to each photo removing dust spots, exposure corrections etc. I then export those to a new album at full resolution PLUS again at Web resolution. The Web resolution goes on line, the high res version is for pilot requests so they have a copy to make a print or use as their desktop background etc. 

After about 1 month I re visit the original jpg files (the card downloads) and export each set into an index album at low resolution, & then delete the original jpg's. The index album along with the RAW files still allows re creating any photo later to it's best result because it's either going to be a print or run in a magazine article.

[diverhank]

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@inkjunkie wrote:

...Which leads me to my problem. Many of these photos should simply be deleted. But I just can't bring myself to doing so. How do you folks deal with photos that just aren't worth editing but you don't want to delete them? Do you just export them to a folder on a removable device?

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Most people, myself included, start out like you...we are too attached to our pictures so we keep them all...after a while though, you will come to a realization that you will simply never revisit these pictures ever.  I had never had to go back and selected a picture that I didn't select the first time...The caveat would be family pictures...rejected pictures I took 20 years ago (film days) became so acceptable and valuable today (a horrible picture of my younger self is still a lot better than the best picture of my present day self).

Back in 2011, I started out keeping 90% of my (digital) pictures and now I only keep about 25%, sometimes less.  The rest are permanently deleted.  Those I keep, I run a batch file backing them up on 3 separate portable hard drives (quadruple redundancy).

[Waddizzle]

If you want to shoot video, then I suggest that you invest in spare memory cards for your camera and a battery grip.

As for your issue with Lightroom, I suggest that you invest in storage devices, preferably a network storage device.  You do not want to rely on “the cloud” to store your images, and you do not want them all stored on one device or drive.

Learn how to use “presets” to update batches of photos as they are imported, and check the box for “build smart preview” during the Import process.  The reason is not important now, but you wil be thankful later.

I think Lightroom is a fantastic program.  I have thousands of photos that I wanted to delete at the time.  They were all shot as RAW, and I have learned a few things about post-processing since I took the photos.  I have been archiving photos recently, and I always get sidetracked on a photo.  Many times the results are pretty awesome.  Uninteresting photos, are suddenly VERY interesting.

[inkjunkie]

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@Waddizzle wrote:

If you want to shoot video, then I suggest that you invest in spare memory cards for your camera and a battery grip.

As for your issue with Lightroom, I suggest that you invest in storage devices, preferably a network storage device.  You do not want to rely on “the cloud” to store your images, and you do not want them all stored on one device or drive.

Learn how to use “presets” to update batches of photos as they are imported, and check the box for “build smart preview” during the Import process.  The reason is not important now, but you wil be thankful later.

I think Lightroom is a fantastic program.  I have thousands of photos that I wanted to delete at the time.  They were all shot as RAW, and I have learned a few things about post-processing since I took the photos.  I have been archiving photos recently, and I always get sidetracked on a photo.  Many times the results are pretty awesome.  Uninteresting photos, are suddenly VERY interesting.

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Like most folks we rely on a cloud for backing up our cell phone contacts. When we got our phones my wife set her cloud up to back up everything. She takes a ton of pictures. Needless to say her cloud got fill. She got the pop up saying her cloud needs attention. I figured out what had happened so I set up a "One Drive" account for her. One Drive didn't back up her pictures in any order. We were having breakfast a few months back and he phone did a reset to factory specs....apparently she picked up a virus. Needless to say the train wreck that she has.Some of her contacts were not on the Verizon Cloud, some of her pictures are gone because both of those cloud based backups were both fill.....absolute nightmare.

When I am at the track I am going to go back to shooting in RAW/JPEG. I would like to be able to post a few of the decent JPEGS just so that some photos of the event are up in  reasonable fashion, this way I can take my time with the Editing.

I noticed that on the Canon site the 5dMark IV is available with the grip for $3199, which is the same price as it is on a couple of retailers. I was not planning on getting the grip but it sounds like it is more or less free in the package deal. And it makes sense to have the battery capacity for the video. I am planning on having several cards, more like half a dozen or so. Few years back I showed up at the track with only one card...and somehow it got coruupted....