The Minimalist Approach to Photo Collections
How many times have you heard this advice from fellow photographers: “Keep everything! Storage is cheap! You never know when you might come back and find a hidden gem you’d previously overlooked.” The advice is so common, it’s practically the norm.
I have pretty much the opposite perspective: We are all drowning in digital detritus. The “keep everything” philosophy results in 100,000-message inboxes, music collections overflowing with stuff that will never be listened to again, and photo libraries consisting mostly of images that will never be used (posted, printed, or even returned to by the photographer). Honestly, if our music and photo libraries were still physical things, we’d be considered hoarders.
I’m on the Marie Kondo side of this one — If it doesn’t bring you joy, let it go. The best record collection is one that’s been lovingly curated over years, to include the absolute best. Practicing zero-inbox gets a huge albatross off your shoulders. And the most satisfying — and manageable — photo library is one that consists only of images that are worthy of posting or sharing.
But that takes work — if storage is cheap, why bother? I see conversations in photo communities all the time about how people are running out of space, and need a more scalable storage solution. Do I need a NAS? How long will it take to copy this 4TB drive to an 8TB drive, and then to back it up to the cloud? Or, in the worst case: “Why can’t I find anything?” (in my view, if you can’t find an image you shot 10 years ago quickly, you may as well not have shot it — bonus points if you can do that from any computer or device you own). And some people — like Apple Photos or Lightroom Cloud users — only have so much space quota in the cloud before they have to pay for more.
If you cull deliberately, and don’t let yourself sit on images you’ll never use, you’ll go a long way to staving off that NAS purchase, or needing to pay Apple or Adobe for more space.
Hit Rate = Keep Rate
Photographers usually aim for a “hit rate” — the ratio of images they consider keepers to ones that didn’t quite work out. I feel like that hit rate should be roughly equivalent to the percentage of images you keep. If your average hit rate is 1/5, and you have a weekend outing and return with 1000 images, then only 200 of those should remain in your collection when you’re done culling. That’s not a rule — “There ain’t no law” and I don’t sit around counting them — but it is a working guideline that’s served me well.
I shoot like crazy, but in four years I’ve kept just 13,500 images, for a total of .5 TB. My library fits neatly onto 2 TB external drive that won’t run out of space for another 10 years (at this rate). It backs up easily to Adobe and Backblaze, and I haven’t felt the need for a more complex solution. Of course, the situation would be different for a wedding photographer, or other professional who has a contractual obligation to hold onto everything. Those users have their own needs, but (I’d argue) most of us would be far better served by a workflow based around distillation, not mass preservation.
My philosophy about music, images, and emails is that no matter how much you delete, you’ll still have way too many. You can afford to delete ruthlessly, liberally, to be strict with yourself about what makes the cut.
There is a school of thought that you could accidentally delete something you later decide you wanted. I suppose it’s possible, but I believe that with a thorough workflow, you can make this possibility close to zero. I can say that I’ve personally never experienced it. Then again, how would I know I accidentally deleted a keeper if they’re all gone? True, but I have looked at every image during the culling process, and have high confidence that I’m not deleting anything keep-worthy. And if mistakes have been made, well OK — I’m still swimming in more content than I’ll ever be able to use. In my view, the benefits of having a tightly curated collection greatly outweigh the risk of accidentally deleting something.
Workflow
My personal workflow is based around the process of winnowing each shoot down to its essence — the true keepers. I work (like most of us) on one “event” at a time — a vacation, a hike, a party. Before I do almost any editing, the primary goal is to winnow and cull. For Lightroom users, the “X” key (Reject) is your best friend. When you tap “X” in the grid, that image is grayed out. I make several passes through the event, rejecting everything that’s not as good as the image sitting next to it. Sometimes the differences are subtle — a change in the light or the angle, or one is in slightly better focus. Selecting two or more images and tapping Opt+C will invoke the Two-Up view, which lets you view two images at once for tighter comparison. I always want to emerge from Two-Up having rejected one of the two images I’m comparing. Sure, there are times when I end up keeping both because I can’t decide, and sometimes it takes a bit of “pre-editing” to see which of the two to keep, but the goal of this part of the process is removal, not editing.
When you feel you’ve rejected everything you can, Lightroom’s filtering tools come into play. Filter the event on rejected photos, hit Cmd+A to Select All, then Cmd+Option+Delete to send those images to the trash.
When you exit the filter view, the event will look 10x better — it’s amazing how good it feels to watch the event “tighten up” so quickly. Now the real editing process begins, but now you know you’re putting your time into working on just the images you are likely to post or share, not ones that will sit around unused for years.
I can imagine that some readers will be cringing in horror at this point. I get it — deleting your photos is scary. The point is that you’re not doing it willy nilly — you’re doing it intentionally, and after having carefully scrutinized the source material. You are deleting with high confidence that you haven’t lost anything that should have been kept.
At the end of the process, I make sure every image is geolocated (for myself, not the world), titled and tagged, so I can find it again quickly in the future, but that’s just my habit and has nothing to do with the strategy of minimalism.
The take-away is that I think most photographers looking for a more capacious storage solution would actually be better served with a more deletion-centric workflow. Instead of figuring out how to store and back up and manage a gigantic collection, consider focusing on ways to not have a giant collection to begin with! You might even find that you don’t need that NAS after all.
