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Deleting photos is expensive!
#1

I found an interesting article giving a new take on the usefulness of deleting photos.

http://chasejarvis.com/blog/2007/04/word...why-i.html

Chase Jarvis Wrote:Ultimately, hard drive space is probably cheaper than the value of your time sunk into establishing which pictures to trash forever - especially given the plummeting cost of storage. Sure, a tightly edited collection is nice. But as long as you can highlight the heroes, you're not required to chuck the chafe. Perhaps you only tag, and give the full presidential treatment to a certain percentage of your images, but truly it MUST be more expensive, both now and in the future, to throw out a 10 mb RAW file than it is to keep it.
He's looking at it from a future returns basis -- that image you delete may be worth something one day -- but also alludes to the cost of storage. If I think about how much time it takes to go through and be really really sure that I want to delete a photo that's marginal, or even just to flag a photo that's not very good, it just doesn't make good financial sense.

Let's say that it takes me thirty seconds per image to load, preview, review, select, and delete images. If it takes 90 images to make up a gigabyte, then I'll spend 45 minutes doing it. I'm an indecisive procrastinator, so let's say it takes a normal person about 20 minutes to clear a gigabyte of bad images.

I can buy a 250GB hard drive for less than $100, including taxes. I'm diligent, so I'm actually storing two copies of everything, meaning that those 90 images are actually taking up 2GB of space -- that's still only 80 cents per doubled gigabyte.

That tells me that if I work quickly, I can save $2.40 an hour by deleting images.
If it was a paying job, I wouldn't take it.

matthewpiers.com • @matthewpiers | robertsonphoto.blogspot.com | @thewsreviews • thewsreviews.com
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#2

Interesting way of looking at it.
With certain workflows, your conclusion makes sense.

Shooting jpgs and being able to view them in seconds means that my numbers come out very different, but I still only delete 1 photo in a thousand.
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#3

You may be able to view them in seconds, but there's still the time to tag and delete them. And, instead of my 90 images to clear a gigabyte, you'll need to clear four or five hundred. That still sounds uncomfortably like work to me.

matthewpiers.com • @matthewpiers | robertsonphoto.blogspot.com | @thewsreviews • thewsreviews.com
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#4

But we LOVE playing with our pictures.
How can that be called work?
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