Bryan Posted January 21, 2018 Share Posted January 21, 2018 Of old files. At this time gloomy time of year I have been driven to looking through my old shots in the LR catalogue and have found that I used to be much more promiscuous in collecting and keeping images. There are so many similars or just plain dross that I feel the need for a cull. It fits my parsimonious nature to eliminate waste and reduce the storage space required. No money in it though, just filling time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Lewis Posted January 22, 2018 Share Posted January 22, 2018 "Parsimonious"; had to look that one up. I could easily throw out at least half of what I shoot, maybe more, if I cared to. Storage is cheap compared to the mental anguish I would endure in the binning of half my images. I think I'll keep them. Rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 22, 2018 Share Posted January 22, 2018 I have done that. Also did a recent purge on Alamy. I was very close to, or at 5600 images, then all of a sudden a big decrease from the first batch of deletions. And something like another 100 or more to disappear in April. Most similars, also some old images that I’ve shot better since (different years) and want the nicest to come up in searches instead of the lesser quality ones. It wasn’t too bad...out of 5600 images, only 200-300 gotten rid of. I feel it makes what is seen in a search a bit more likely to be licensed. It’s not like I deleted a category. I’m still well-represented. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted January 22, 2018 Author Share Posted January 22, 2018 I've not tackled my Alamy collection as yet Betty, but probably should do so. A few years back I decided to get rid of some shots but first did a search of what had sold, and was alarmed to find that some earmarked for deletion had sold for good money. I clearly have an imperfect understanding of how the market operates! I guess that I need to be more ruthless and cull the similars, particularly when there is a better more recent shot available. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Normspics Posted January 22, 2018 Share Posted January 22, 2018 As software improves it is possible to salvage or restore images that may have been marginal, also as computer skills improve past photos can be reworked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 22, 2018 Share Posted January 22, 2018 7 hours ago, Bryan said: I've not tackled my Alamy collection as yet Betty, but probably should do so. A few years back I decided to get rid of some shots but first did a search of what had sold, and was alarmed to find that some earmarked for deletion had sold for good money. I clearly have an imperfect understanding of how the market operates! I guess that I need to be more ruthless and cull the similars, particularly when there is a better more recent shot available. Understood! I had to many similars of my peanut butter cookies. I picked one to delete. Aarrghh, it was the only one that had sold! It’s baaack.... I should have searched what had sold first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Lewis Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 I have deleted a few on Alamy because they were truly awful. But I really hesitate to delete anything other than the awful ones because, like Bryan, I find myself challenged to understand what will sell & what won't. I hate to admit that I've submitted some real stinkers, probably due to my impatience with growing my portfolio, so a serious review of my port is probably a good idea. I know there are more I could / should delete. But back to Bryan's original thought, I have never purged any images from my hard drives, and probably never will. Storage is so cheap now, I'll find something else to occupy my time. Rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 On 1/22/2018 at 04:45, Normspics said: As software improves it is possible to salvage or restore images that may have been marginal, also as computer skills improve past photos can be reworked. Yes, I have reworked a few from my HDs. But usually the bad ones were just not sharp enough and I deleted them. Camera shake or not fast enough SS for movement. I’d rather use my time on new work taken with much better skills than I had back when, while learning. I’ve spoken before about the perils of falling in love with an image. You see how everything comes together...color, BG, but you ignore what’s wrong because you love everything else about it. I had a lot of those images on my HDs. Many had already failed QC, and the rest would too. I deleted them. If I decide to revisit old images, I’d rather see those that have possibility rather than have to weed through those that don’t. I do agree that those we passed on because of excessive noise might be rescued with the software we have now. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 I posted a thread on this subject back in May 2016 (Deleting Images), and there have been several others. I'm still unsure of what to do, so mostly I've done nothing. Here's a possible compromise: reduce search terms on a questionable image, one where you don't like the PP, but do not delete it. Do a better PP job and submit the reedited image. Great, eh? Okay, not so great -- just winter make work. I think I'll go back to doing nothing about a purge, just letting my collection sit where it is. Basically, I spend my time planning, shooting, editing, and keying. Everything else is guess work. Edo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted January 23, 2018 Author Share Posted January 23, 2018 2 hours ago, Ed Rooney said: Here's a possible compromise: reduce search terms on a questionable image, one where you don't like the PP, but do not delete it. Do a better PP job and submit the reedited image. Great, eh? Okay, not so great -- just winter make work Edo Just done that today Edo. Looking out for similars found an image whose colour temp was cold enough to give me the shivers (must have been brain dead when I originally dealt with it) reprocessed it and uploaded. Hopefully it will pass tomorrow.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Looking back on one today's licences from 2013, it's so soft I'd never have dared to submit it now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Not conducting any serious purges at the moment, although I'm constantly doing random mini-purges of images on my HD's. I tend to horde RAW files because I sometimes go back and find hidden "gems" that I overlooked. I don't have any plans to purge my Alamy collection -- i.e. I still subscribe to the "you never know what might sell" philosophy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marianne Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I deleted about 300 out of around 800 images from Alamy over 2015-2016 - no idea if it was worth doing. I have so many duplicates on my hard drives and many images that probably should have been culled ages ago, that I think it's worth purging a bit, since if I do go back through old shoots as I often do to find the hidden gems, which I have done, or to process shoots I never really got around to working with, I realize having a lean and mean portfolio will probably save me a lot of time and effort in the long run. I'm shooting far less now than I used to, trying to pretend I just have a few rolls of film rather than unlimited hard drive space. Just ordered new 6TB and 4TB hard drives to replace aging drives - backup space isn't endless. So I'm purging what I've can from my main backups before I fill the new drives - though I may give up part way through - it takes eons just to go through 1TB, never mind many. I used to just keep buying new drives when the old drives filled up, but eventually I realized that with 10 TBs of backups it becomes really tough to find what you want. I'm just going through my main catalog. I figure it's not worth purging the old multiple mobile backup drives. I'll just keep them as extra backups because the time it would take to review and cull them all is just too great. Half will probably fail before I could get through them all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 9 hours ago, spacecadet said: Looking back on one today's licences from 2013, it's so soft I'd never have dared to submit it now. Whenever I think about culling I recall a similar sale, for good money - better than I have seen for a while - which has serious camera shake. I don't know how I let it through back in ~2002, it certainly wouldn't get submitted now, I wouldn't give QC chance to fail it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 15 hours ago, spacecadet said: Looking back on one today's licences from 2013, it's so soft I'd never have dared to submit it now. I have that tee shirt! I’ve become very discerning. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colinp Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Never delete any images, why would you even consider that? Of course some may not look pretty in your collection but never underestimate what sells.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 We all are looking for hints on what might be sales-worhty, and a purge is part of that. But do we really have any way to know what will sell in the future? I think not. We guess, and sometimes we guess right, sometimes wrong. We know what has sold in the past. Is that telling? Hmm. Maybe it's helpful. Do zooms tell us what will sell? Of my last 17 zooms, just one turned into a sale. One. And I'm having the best month for sales I've ever had. So . . . should we purge? And what should we do? I don't know, but here's what I do: I think I know what a stock subject looks like now, so I shoot, I do the PP, and if it looks good, that's is if I still like it, I submit it. (And when we get stressed about all this stuff, Bryan and I like to wash some dishes by hand.) Edo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 14 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said: (And when we get stressed about all this stuff, Bryan and I like to wash some dishes by hand.) Edo ...or in your case, Ed, cook some pasta and make our mouths water. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 54 minutes ago, colinp said: Never delete any images, why would you even consider that? Of course some may not look pretty in your collection but never underestimate what sells.... Geoff S, who we’re not seeing in the forum these days, purged his collection and began seeing stronger sales. He deleted a goodly number of images. So it can work. He tested everything to the max, so when he shared results, I believed him. So if I make a sale of a weak image, who knows how many times it came up in a search and was ignored when a stronger image of the same subject was relegated to later pages? The stronger image that might have sold more times than the weak one if the weak one was gone and the strong one moved up? Those are what I’ve deleted. Not singles. But weak duplicates. If someone sees my cookies, hopefully they’ll see the strongest images, because the weak one is gone. Unless you’ve actually tried it, you can’t know that it won’t work. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Rather than purge I moved my best images (ones that had sold, or carefully selected new ones) to a new pseudonym and left all my older, stuff in an pseudonym of its own. I was going to start afresh with a new account but thouight I would try this first. After a year or so with no new submission (disllusioned) that "best" work pseudonym seems to be outperforming the older, ordinary stuff, by 700% on the basis of respective image numbers. I am going to focus on that for a few months with carefully selected new work and see if I can drive sales up. See the Pseudonym thread in Ask the Forum for more details Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 6 hours ago, spacecadet said: ...or in your case, Ed, cook some pasta and make our mouths water. Here, Mark -- tuck in! Tortellini with garlic butter and cheese. I didn't have sage, but sage would be better than the parsley I had. This dish take just 15 to 20 minutes to do. I bet M&S does some good fresh pasta. There's was a great food selection when I lived in London and Oxfordshire. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted January 25, 2018 Share Posted January 25, 2018 M&S is too expensive for the likes of us these days. Sainsbury's carry some decent lines if you look out for the special offers. But I just know they're not as good as yours, Ed. Mmm. It's breakfast time here and I'm in danger of looking unfavourably on my slice of toast and Marmite now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted January 25, 2018 Share Posted January 25, 2018 Mark, they call this a breakfast pizza at Emporio, an Italian restaurant near me that does them on weekends: cooked ham, sausage, mozzarella, and two eggs. Ian, the problem I have is not how but why we are deleting images. Basically, we want to get rid of material that we feel will not sell in the future. We think they are damaging our placement. But . . . every month I have two types of images that sell: those that have sold before (at least the subject) and those that have never sold before. So which images should we be deleting? It remains a puzzlement. Edo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted January 25, 2018 Share Posted January 25, 2018 2 hours ago, Ed Rooney said: every month I have two types of images that sell: those that have sold before (at least the subject) and those that have never sold before. So which images should we be deleting? It remains a puzzlement. Edo Mmm, looks like breakfast to me. All my sales fall into those two categories too. Who'd'a thought it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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