What do I do with all my pictures?

[mgeary]

I have come to realize lately, that I am thoroughly overwhelmed by all the pictures I have. I have only been shooting for the good part of a year, and I can't imagine how things will be later on down the road.

My trouble comes in deciding what to keep, what to print, and how to organize. How do I organize between true "keeper shots" which are a more "serious" side of my photography and the other side which mostly consists of photos of friends. Maybe I even have trouble expressing my dilemma in words.

I do shoot digital, and I sort through all my shots by flagging the ones I like. Once this is done, I have hundreds of flagged photos, but when moving to a physical form, printing them, what should I do with them? 4x6 all my friend photos for memories? What do I do with all the photos I consider my better photography? 8x12?

It may sound vague, but I just don't know what to do with my pictures.

Has anyone else been through this, found solutions or currently struggles through this with me?

 

[Pickett Wilson]

First of all, if you have been shooting for a year, and you have hundreds of flagged photos, it's time to go through them again. And again. You have to learn to be a hard editor of your own work. Pick out 10 you like the best to print and archive the rest. Wait a year and look at them again. 🙂

 

[mgeary]

That's an interesting idea, just print 10.

The hundreds I have flagged are by all means not top work, those hundreds are of friends and trips and things.

 

[Mcary]

That's an interesting idea, just print 10.

The hundreds I have flagged are by all means not top work, those hundreds are of friends and trips and things.

Start with the hundreds you have flagged and assign a "1" to the ones you think are the strongest images. Now go those and assign a "2" to the ones you think are strongest. Then repeat until you have only 10 left.

 

[Spleenrippa]

Easy solution: buy more gear and spend all your free time on RFF. You don't have to worry about actually getting out and shooting anything. As a consequence, your organisational dilemma disappears 🙂

 

[jsrockit]

Picking 10 is silly if you have more than 10 great ones... which can be possible. I think you need to take all the friends and family pics and put them in a different folder ... and either forget about them for now or put them on the web for your friends to see and be done with them. Then, with the remainder of images, really edit hard. I've started sorting mine by what type of photo they are... not genre, but type ... like, windows, walls, people, cars, text, etc... then once they are in those groups, I compare them against like types and it becomes more apparent which images are better.

 

[jan normandale]

I'm going to assume you have already some form of physical storage like binders or file boxes for storage. If not that's the first thing you need to do

Set the folders into a timeline and keep a journal of your daily shooting in your camera bag. Using these dates you can match up to the subjects if you need to find the "model shoot" or the "summer fair" shoot etc. This helps put some order and logic to the images.

Make a "contact sheet" for each of the 'pages of stored negatives or transparencies' and place it into the binder or file box along with the appropriate sleeve of film.

From there using your journal you can find your images from 2003 or 2007 or last month. I also place a descriptive on the 'contact sheet' at the top corner to assist in faster subject identification. So all the summer fairs I shot at can be sorted if I choose that as a subject I want to go into.

I also keep a computer based back up which I can sort quickly if I want to find all the summer fairs I can ask for that and it will provide the dates. Then I go into the binders or folders.

Choosing images is another matter entirely up to you. Selection is highly personal and can also be open to discussion. Selection is taste and that's up to you and some contest judges, each who will bring their own personal criteria to a photo selection. I can tell you your taste will seldom be the judges taste so your criteria may be good for you but may also cause good images to be discarded. Be thoughtful of this fact when you are in your selection process and deleting images.

Good luck with the organizing

 

[ebino]

I know we live in a utilitarian age but in all honesty there is not much you can do with your pictures.

Edit, organize and back up. Share on the internet and make blurb books. If you want you could do a small exhibition in your local bar or gallery slash artsy cafe.

 

[shadowfox]

Making a photo-book is a great way to preserve and organize those trip memories, especially when you have friends to share it with.

The ultimate thing to do to your film negatives are to print them in the darkroom. That's a world onto itself, so consider yourself warned 🙂

 

[JoeV]

Ditto the photo-book suggestion. I've started doing this, after my wife's gentle "what are you going to do with all of those image files on the computer, no one can see or enjoy them" rant.

Here's the cover of my first book:

 

[Steve M.]

I think this is the real issue w/ today's photography, and digital just made things that much more difficult due to the sheer number of images you can take. Truthfully, I think most people no longer even print their photos, they just look at them on the computer, post them online, and email them.

I shoot film and I have a LOT of negatives, scanned and in print files. OK, a lot of them aren't even in print files, they're just in a box filled w/ the negatives/4x6 prints from the lab. Recently I had to sit down and think through this issue. What exactly am I gonna do w/ my photos from here on out? Do I plan on a show? Maybe, it would be nice to have other people see them like that, but that involves a ton of work and money for all that matting and framing. Do I plan on selling them online? No one I have ever met made any money that way. Besides, B&W negs are nicest when printed.

So what do I do w/ them? For now, my plan is to enlarger print the MF ones that are keepers (not many) and send my 35mm scanned files to an online print service for 8x12's. Then cut some foam board w/ a beveled edge and dry mount the photos to the board and hang them up on the wall. No matting or framing needed that way. What's the use of being a photographer if you don't have prints on the wall? We all probably have to come up w/ our own schemes that match our expectations.

 

[mgeary]

Thanks for all the replies. It sure is a weird feeling. I throw things on flickr, but I feel that there's no cohesion at all, no direction. I plan to print 8x12s soon and mat only the best. I have a long way to go in all this, it's a much deeper hobby than I thought. It really has changed the way I think in a lot of ways.

 

[Brian Puccio]

Personally? I scan all rolls at full resolution. (Harddrive space is cheap and the scan runs while I'm asleep or at work.) Each roll was already numbered as it was shot (so my notes on analog exif can correspond with something) so I have my computer save each roll as roll000060-frame10, for example. Each roll is cut into multiples of six and put into sleeves in a binder. Each page holds 7x6 so 42 frames, so plenty of space since I usually get 38 pictures per roll. Each page is labeled with the roll number. Now I can easily match the image in the computer with the frame in the binder and vica versa.

As for the computer, I group each event together in Aperture (e.g., under vacations I have Germany, Austia, San Francisco, Colorado, etc., each trip I take; under museums I have The Met, The MoMA, etc., and under each museum a year, since I often return to them after a while because they're so close and cheap). I rate each photo reject, 1, 3 or 5. I find a 1-5 scale too granual. What's the difference between a 3 and a 4? Reject is any image out of focus, horribly underexposed etc. I also reject any extra exposures I have. E.g., if I bracket some night shot, I'll get rid of the two I don't want. If I took two of a group of people I reject the one least ideal, etc.

A 1 is an OK photo. Nothing impressive, but if I only took one photo of a certain thing, I keep it because it's all I have of it. My photos are my memories. Sure, many of you will say toss what isn't amazing, and that's fine. But I like looking back at my photos, even if they aren't awesome ones.

A 3 is a "good" photo, one that people would look at and say that's a "good" photo. Everyone defines good differently, you may not think any of my 3's are good photos. But that's OK. If people ask to see my vacation photos, they won't see any 1's, but they'll see 3's. And I'll upload them to my website or flickr.

A 5 is a "really good" photo. What's the difference between "good" and "really good"? A really good photos makes me think "this is why I like taking photos, it makes me really happy with myself". If I'm traveling for two weeks, maybe I take 300 photos and of them 10 are 5's. Maybe 3 are. Maybe 20 are. But these get printed. And when I say printed, I mean 11x17. I don't like looking at small photos, so I just print big. And I'll stick it in my photo album. If someone comes over and says oh, you take photos, can I see? I had them my photo album. I'll also hang these on the wall sometimes.

Anything not a reject gets keyword tagged as well as geotagged, making things very easy to find in the future. Combine this with one off-site backup and one on-site backup (plus the original rolls of film in the film binder) and I'm all set.

 

[Steve_F]

An interesting but annoying dilemma. I personally would print all the memory ones as 6x4 and put them in an album. Just like you would prints from negs. We have hundreds of our first born, out of thousands on hard disk. There are some excellent on line printers here in the UK and if you order more than, it was 100, I think they cost 7p each. (about 10c). They are real 'wet' photos on Fuji crystal archive paper. We've had enlargements of our favourites done too.
Our second born we have hardly any prints (no time to do anything) but have boxes of 35mm transparencies. Convenience and archiving.
The philosophy behind the hundreds of our son is that in the event of a major crash of both hard drives we still have prints. Oh and of course you may have issues viewing those digital files in a decade.
Just print.

Steve.

 

[jesse1dog]

I have used Arrowfile: www.arrowfile.com and found there are some useful ideas there - there must be equivalent systems elsewhere than GB.
Think ebino has the right philosophy.
Blurb books do concentrate the mind and provide some evidence of your photograhic activity to others. As long as you quite like their printing it isn't all that an expensive option either. You can easily get 70 pictures into one of their basic books.
jesse