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Comment by magic5227 | Hacker News Reader

As a side note I think this brings up another interesting problem than just dealing with the storage, which is, how to enjoy so many photos in a lifetime.

Personally, I decided to severely restrict how many images I keep after a trip, so I'm more likely to actually view them years from now.

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My workflow after a photo session is:

* Quickly scan pics and delete anything that is flat out bad. I try to get these on the spot, but some slip through.

* Go through again and rate.

* Go through again and adjust ratings further.

* Post process the 5 stars, and put them up to view.

* Everything else is saved through an offline backup service.

I find that the 5 star pics end up being great covers into an event. Often the 5 star pics are good enough, but sometimes they draw me in the look at the rest. The only downside is you have to be ruthless with your ratings.

mine is (say D750 as a source, with raw+basic jpeg): - move all jpegs from card, keep raws there - go through jpegs, select "best" (ie worth further work), for worthy ones take RAW from card instead of jpeg - select panoramas to join in autopano - join panoramas (source is jpeg, if anybody knows how to do it with Nikon Raws, please share!) - select best panoramas (often quality is visible only after all is rendered) - if I have multiple sources (photos, panos with different naming, GF camera, Gopro, phones etc.) I make one single unified ordering based on file names (this is crude process, but no clue about anything better) - process those Raws in Lightroom, put them back - post on flickr for parents (don't have FB) - select even more for FB albums for all rest - delete all raws on memory card (ie except those few worthy processing that were moved from it)

cumbersome process, but I simply don't like the workflow Lightroom is forcing me to use, so I use it only for Raw edits. Now where to backup those selected few is another question, since I don't want to pay...

I do about the same except that "rating" need not be precise. There are only three categories:

- good / pick (5 stars)

- bad => delete (your first step)

- in between => no need to rate further

There is no objective difference between a 2-star and a 3-star image; the really interesting step is to rate the picks (I actually quite enjoy this step).

I'm doing the same, except the picks are realistically going to be separated into four and five stars later, where there will probably only be one five-star photo, maybe two if I'm super lucky. The four-star ones may go on Instagram, or they usually just go to the great storage in the sky.

My parents had some old biscuit tins full of photos from their early years. Work dos, holidays, photos of me and my family growing up, our pets, early memories (for them, rather than me.)

I can't count how many hours I spent sat sorting through those photos and asking my Mum questions about who was in this one, or where this one was taken, or what year this was.

There were probably a few hundred photos. And this was in a time when it was costly to both take and develop photos and a pain to physically store them. I would've gladly sat looking at thousands of photos if they were there.

So now that I'm married and we have a little girl, I think about what our daughter's equivalent to my tin of photos may be. Maybe we do keep too many photos, but maybe she will enjoy looking at our many thousands of photos. Maybe she'll enjoy the technical challenge of making sense of her life in photos and videos. Or maybe she will hate us for storing so much! Either way I think, if I were her, I'd rather have more than less.

Still, when you shot film you rarely shot 20 frame bursts of the same baby-posing-with-toy that we do today with dSLRs. Simply because it was expensive and you were pretty likely to miss something important while you changed rolls.

If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.

On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.

I'm kinda up in the air about how to display the images I've sorted and edited the set down to something reasonable. I was a photo editor at my college paper and each event gets one photo you get practice cutting down the photo sets.

I send some to flickr, some google+ and so on. I need a more consistent strategy.

I uploaded to google plus a couple months back and it asked to create a "story". I really like the presentation of photos. Google makes it hard to link and share but the results for a group of photos are good.

The example:

https://plus.google.com/115477748015409107850/stories/4b3ddf...

Same link, differnt url. (sigh... google)

https://plus.google.com/+AramComjean/posts/ig1cSZAvt9Q

Shrug. I've got about 1.5 TB from the last ten or twelve years, and I do often go back through the organized albums and events. Often it's to find something specific, often just looking for something good, often just for nostalgia.

I'm quite glad I have them, and rating and filtering is just as good as tossing them out in my experience.

I put them on my TV. I have a "TV" "playlist" or whatever you want to call it, and I move photos in and out every couple of weeks. I almost always have the TV on. I listen to streaming audio over the TV while it shows photos. When we're looking for something to watch, we often stop and talk about things and the screensaver kicks in, showing us our photos. And it's easy to change up! No picture frames to deal with or hanging anything.

I'm tending to keep all of my originals in case I ever want to flip through the full set, but I've been tagging a smaller portion into either a "good photography" or "good family/etc memory" categories. Then I can easily filter down to a smaller set of photos.

Then again, I haven't been taking a huge amount of photos lately. If I ramp it back up, maybe I'll need to reconsider.

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