What's a good strategy for choosing which photos to keep?

Question

Since moving from a 6 megapixel DSLR to a 12.5 megapixel micro-four-thirds, the much bigger file sizes (especially shooting RAW) mean that I can't be so open about keeping everything I shoot.

I only have a 640GB primary drive for all my video and stills, and a 640GB backup drive - and they are getting fuller every day.

But going through photos and deleting bad ones can be a tedious process. I've slowly been going through old photos and pressing delete if they are obviously out of focus or have too much motion blur. But it still leaves a lot of photos that just seem uninspiring, or where I have a lot of photos that are very similar, taking up space. I'm too worried to delete them since they're actually usable, and I may find a use in future.

• What is a good process for choosing what to delete and what to keep?

• At what stage of the process do think it's best to do it?

Answer

I don't know if this is a great system, but here's what I do:

1. After the shoot/session is done I immediately sort through every frame I took looking for the 'keepers.' I do it this way because for me it is easier to choose to keep the great shots than it is to delete the borderline shots... That may just be me. :-)
2. Next I sort through every frame I didn't put in the 'keepers' pile and look for anything that is bad enough to just trash immediately- usually there are a few out-of-focus or technically flawed photos that I didn't delete 'on-the-fly' which get taken out back behind the barn and put out of my misery.
3. I then look through the 'Keepers' and see if there are any 'holes' in the shoot that I will need to fill with the shots that weren't good enough to make my 'keepers' pile, but weren't bad enough to trash... Call it my 'marginal' pile if you will. If there are holes to be filled I then pick the 'best of the worst' to fill in those holes.
4. I post-process all the 'Keepers.' If it's a personal session I post 'em, if it's a professional session I work with the client further from there to close the contract. For client contracts this is it. I keep both the 'keepers' and the 'marginal' shots forever and get ingested into my backup solution (which is an entirely different process).
5. After some time has passed (I usually do this every month for any personal work that happened 3 months prior in order to allow myself a bit of perspective) I re-examine the 'marginal' pile to see if time has changed my initial impressions of those photographs... Usually there are a few in the 'marginal' pile that I like enough to keep. The rest are shown no mercy and get to go to the round file from there.

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