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TIP: keep less pictures

You attended your best friend’s wedding and came back with 100 excellent pictures; you have 400

amazing pictures from your backpacking trip abroad; you spent a week in New York City and have over

200 great pictures or you took the citifari photo tour over the afternoon and believe that 50 of these

shots are worth keeping. Really? Maybe not. Here are three reasons why you should keep fewer

pictures:

• Reason #1: time to review – if you are sharing these pictures online or offline, think about your

audience. How long will it take them to go through all these pictures? If it takes 2 seconds to

review a picture, no offence but, will anyone want to spend 15 minutes going over the pictures

of your trip? More than a minute to review your afternoon? And this is not counting the

potential download times if you were to send them over the internet. Will you go over these

400 pictures next year and review them all? Is the idea of spending 15 minutes to look at

pictures that you have already seen before discouraging enough for you not to look at them

ever again? What if it took you 2 minutes instead of 15? Would you consider looking over them

again? Probably.

• Reason #2: improve your photo skills – by filtering your pictures and keeping only the best ones,

you will get used to thinking about the photos you will like best from the moment of shooting.

You will also become more discerning about your photography. Next time, when you are out,

you will already know and will try to shoot only those pictures that you think you will like

afterwards. You will already visualize the outcome when taking the shot and that will impact the

quality of your photos.

• Reason #3: post-processing effort – if you work on your pictures after uploading them onto your

computer, performing a first selection with the best ones before processing will save you a lot of

time as you won’t have to work on them anymore. Once adjusted, you can then perform

another selection and keep the very few that are really good. This is time saved for you to shoot

more.

Then, how many pictures is the right number of pictures? It depends but you can try the following:

Event You took You keep

Afternoon with camera 50 pictures 1 to 5 photos

Family event 100 pictures 10 to 20 photos

Week of vacations 200 pictures 20 to 40 photos

Long vacations 400 pictures 40 to 75 photos