Hi all. Last week I wrote about how I started a podcast, so if you missed it you can click here to find out more.
Episode 2 Topic – Deleting Photos is Good for the Soul!
In this second episode I’ve asked my good friend Brian Matiash to join me. Many of you know Brian from a long career in the photo industry and I consider him one of my best friends and some one I talk to often.
This week, he joined me to talk about how deleting photos can be a good thing. It’s an interesting topic, that I don’t hear people talk about much, but something we both believe in.
How to Listen/Watch
You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google. Or you can watch it below. The podcast is NOT intended to be visual in any way, so all you’re doing is watching the two of us talk and nothing else. But if that’s the way you prefer it, feel free. Personally, podcasts are something I listen to when I have nothing else to do, or to keep me busy while doing something else – so I never watch them.
Apple Podcast Link (Click Here)
Spotify Podcast Link (Click Here)
Google Podcasts Link (Click Here)
OTHER PODCAST PLATFORMS? – I publish this to the main podcast platforms that my podcast host offers. It should show up on all the major ones, but you may use some other podcast software. If you don’t see it, right now there’s nothing I can do. I’m technically incompetent in this area and don’t plan to spend any more time than I already do trying to figure it out 🙂 So please listen using one of the options above.
PRO TIP: I typically listen to podcasts on my phone while driving or in the gym. And I usually set most podcasts to 1.25x – 1.5x speed to get through it faster.
Since this IS NOT A TRAINING tutorial, and it’s just us talking, I think you can speed us up and get through it faster so feel free to give it a try. I can’t help you find that setting, but again… most podcast apps have it so poke around. If you can use Lightroom and Photoshop I have no doubt you can figure out how to use a podcast app 😉
Enjoy!
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Darn phone and my finger. We down sized and we had maybe 20 slide trays 140 each. Not all full. We setup the projector reviewed then and now have about 100 that we knew the who, what, when. The others are in the dumpster. Maybe most or all of the 100 are not great photos but memories.
Yes it felt good. Next are the prints. The tintypes I’ll scan.
Just now catching up on the podcasts.
I once had over 300,000 photographs in my Lightroom catalog. All of my raw files go into Lightroom then get culled as necessary.
I culled it down to under 50,000 and for the last couple of years I have been able to keep it under 50,000. Which means that I am shooting less of the same scene, culling more current shots, and every month or so I will spend an hour culling older shots. Yes, to delete the images that went into a panorama, or bracketed shots that ended up in a single HDR image.
I find that the first time I photograph a new species I keep a lot of shots. But as I go back and shoot more of the same species I try to keep only as many in total as I kept of the first shoot. So, a new bear might have 50 images and a year and four shoots later, I still only have 50 images. (Unless there is a completely new behavior that I need to keep until I get more like it. So call it 60 after a couple of years.)
That does not apply to photos taken for a client of course.
You guys are so on I wish I would have shot in raw, but did not know years ago. So my pic are not as easy to fix, like raw, but having so much fun, you have great video that helped, if I can remember what to do
Thanks
Peg
Hi Matt, you just introduced me to a new rabbit hole. Now I need to listen to podcast 3. This rabbit hole is definitely better a hundred AI generated youtube versions of cute cats. 🙂
I am definitely a hoarder. You hit on so many hot spots with me. Will technology improve so much that I will want go back through this catalog and take another look a few years from now. Having one hard drive with nothing by my four star + photos was a great suggestion. At my age, I am feeling guilty about what my children will have to do when I die.
I will listen to this podcast again.
Jim
Great podcast. I really needed to hear an affirmation of what I need to do and why. One of the best takeaways from the podcast was to make a folder of my best images so that my family knows what was really important to me!
Love the podcasts. Not usually a fan but I don’t intend to miss any of yours.
Your subject is very timely as I am reviewing all of my 20K+ photos and deleting multiple shots. Two reasons: I want to reduce storage requirements and I want to make it easier for my family to decide what to do with the photos. I can delete the multiple shots of the same site and just keep one (if there is one worth keeping). I have a more difficult time when it come to deleting family events. What photos will the parents want of the kids at Christmas when they were three? Your approach of saving hi-qual JPEGS into a designated folder is great. I will be starting to do that. It should also make it easier to delete photos when I know there is a copy of the good ones stored in an easily accessible place.
Keep up the good work.
I’d like more discussion on reasons to move to Lightroom from Lightroom Classic, and what I would do with all the images in my current Lightroom Classic catalogs.
Is the Cloud version of Lightroom really better than Lightroom Classic?
Great podcast. I watched one of Matt’s videos a while back about deleting the clutter and took that to heart. I now have over 20 years of photos down to just under 1tb. I recently watched Brian’s video on using an iPad for editing and was so impressed with what it was capable of, that I went out and bought an iPad(I’m a pc user). I pre-ordered Brian’s LR mobile course as I’m very excited about this whole simpler approach to my photography. I have a 4tb SSD drive that has all of my photos on it. After culling the obvious bad shots from the SD card, I copy them to the SSD and then import them into LR. In LR I go through them one more time to make my final deletes. So far I’ve only used about 40g of my LR cloud storage as I’m not putting any of my old photos up there, with a few exceptions. The SSD is backed up to 2 other HDDs so I’m comfortable that they’re safe. Plus I have the edited & RAW files for all of my important photos in the cloud. If I ever reach my 1tb cloud limit, I’ll likely just delete my oldest photos since they’ll still be accessible on the SSD. I don’t expect to ever be able to fill up a 4tb drive at the pace I seem to be going.
I have been enjoying the podcasts! This one hit home for me as I now have over 1 million photos in my Lightroom Catalog. Yes, I need to be brutal and delete so many photos. I have them and the backups on eight external hard drives that are backed up to Backblaze. I am now tied to Lightroom because of the Collections tool that I have been populating for each year in my catalog. The one main tool I need is a keywording in Lightroom. I tried On1 Keywording and it fails for me.
Look forward to catching up with the other podcasts! Thanks!
An extremely useful discussion. Very recognizable issues which I too have dealt with. You guys gave me the courage to do something about my overgrown photo collection.