Well to be fair there aren’t 1.3 million logical images. I take almost every landscape picture as a panorama, and I bracket my exposures for the shadows and the highlights, so one “logical image” might comprise of 900 RAW files (10 rows, 30 columns, 0, -2, +2). Or maybe I have 3000 images taken ever 5 seconds to make a timelapse movie.
and….wait for it….
I really don’t delete images. Yes yes I know. Flame away.

There’s a few reasons:

1. I have a hard time making permanent decisions.
2. My storage workflow relies on synchronizing 3 different hard drives, and a delete file looks exactly like a missing file.
3. A badly composed image looks a lot like a picture from the middle of a panorama
4. the time it takes to edit (for me see #1, and my techniques for cheap storage) is more than the time it takes to deal with the extra files (I think)

I do remove the terrible images of course. and I reject a lot of the bad images in lightroom so I don’t have to see them (you do have a smart collection that is “all photographs not rejected” created don’t you?)

I’ll post more about each of the reasons in more depth at a later date to explain further.

Dang man you gotta learn how to edit!

Fair point. I definitely could improve my editing. However, the time it takes to make the decisions as to which ones to keep vs which ones to delete, could be better spent working on marketing my images, or creating new images. Hard drives are cheap. 4TB drives can be found under $150 <link to 4TB>

I have friends who spend hours in the field and at home eliminating all but the best images, and there definitely great points about that, but I like to sleep. They save a lot of time looking through their catalogs, but they also miss out on people looking for an image of a goose even if it isn’t a portfolio image for you. or maybe your best image was vertical and they want a landscape image. Perhaps I’m an image hoarder. I will probably be found buried under a pile of pixels some day. I blame the boy scouts. I was taught to always be prepared. and you can win fire building contests by unwinding rope and dousing it with white gas (aka boy scout water).

OR perhaps you will all worship me because I will have the next Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton together photo.

Really though it comes down to the way i shoot (panoramas, timelapse, multi focal) and my belief that the editing takes longer than archiving.

Malcolm Gladwell says you are an expert after having deliberately practiced something for 10,000 hours, but how many photos does it take to equal 10,000 hours? I don’t know, However, I have taken more than a million photos and learned a couple things that I thought others might find useful. I’m not claiming to be an expert, maybe that means I know how much I don’t know, or it just means I’m not there yet

my lightroom catalog as of the end of 2012

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With this blog I hope to share some of the technical tricks and existential questions I’ve come across in amassing more than a million images. I’m hopefully far from done learning myself (I figured one metaphorically ceases to exist when you stop learning)

Some of the topics I’d like to focus on here:

• How to deal with so many images (workflow both at home and on the road)
• What to do with your images now with them (publish in your life, books, donate them, put them in your will, etc.)
• Reasons to be prolific in your shooting
• How do you cope with the computer/hard drives etc to deal with that many images?
• Gear that makes dealing with your photos at home and on the road easier
• Philosophical questions re: why we photograph/burn out of having recorded so many images

I’m not sure I have the answers to any of these, especially the last, but perhaps I can work through some of my own thinking out loud here on this blog and people can chime in with their thoughts. These topics have very personal components (why you photograph, your shooting style, how you think about the world) which will mean that your workflow and organization techniques will likely be very different than mine, but I’ll try to explain why I made the decisions I did. Speaking of which, why I am starting this blog? It seems a shame to figure somethings out and not have them help other people so I thought I could throw them out here and hopefully the search engines will connect folks with similar questions here.