HACKER Q&A
📣 dirkc

I have 1k photos from my weekend away, what should I do?


It has happened with me many times that I go away for a weekend and take lots of photos. But having > 1,000 photos of a weekend is almost worse than having none? Trying to pick the ones to keep makes me anxious and looking at them all regularly isn't practical.

Now I have a few years worth of photos, probably > 100k. What should I do with them?

  👤 mytailorisrich Accepted Answer ✓
Delete.

Be realistic: 500 picture per day. Most of them must essentially be duplicates and/or poor quality, and you're never going to go through them again.

It's fine to take plenty of pictures especially now that it's free. But the benefit is not that you can keep so many pictures, it's that you can take sort them afterwards and keep the good ones without worrying about having missed something.

👤 zilebune
You probably need some 'cooldown time' to take the emotion out of that selection process :)

I also take thousands of pics when travelling...well used to anyway before Covid. Then I store them all in some cold storage, like a backup HDD so they are handy, and look at them again after 1yr or so. By then the important memories of that trip are cemented and I can easily delete the irelevant ones. By then you will know which are important and which need to go in the bin.

👤 mceachen
Photographers will talk about their "workflow," where they spend time after a shoot to flag and cull. That's fine for professionals, but for you and me, it's a chore I'd rather skip.

Most photo managers use timeline views that make shutter-happy events overwhelm all the other events that might only have a couple shots.

I built something different: it uses random sampling and hierarchical tags to make browsing and rediscovery fun, even for very large (500k+) libraries.

Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#fast-and-...

(I'm making the PhotoStructure beta available for free in exchange for feedback, if you want to try it out.)

👤 helph67
Employ a homeless person to take your photos. Think of the karma, for both!