Lately I find myself much more stricter with selecting which photos to upload on social media, and so on. Let me lay out a few outlines that I personally adhere to. Maybe it can provide some sort of guideline to you but as much as I would like to keep each and every photo in my hard drive, I find that it is just logically smart to just keep those which you 'want to keep' and those which will come into use in the future. The logic is just 'if you are 100% certain not ever going to touch it again, why keep?'
Here goes:
1. Sharpness: Picture should be reasonably sharp at the areas which I focused. How sharp it needs to be depends. But generally, I won't keep or use any photos which is not pin sharp at 50% zoom for normal online uploads, and 100% zoom for any commercial work.
2. Photos which are not appropriate. For example: Pictures that show an undesirable expression of a model, pictures that are not respectful (which is always unintended) and so on.
3. Photos which shows similar poses/expressions at the same spot.
4. Photos which are not exactly great shots and will take too much effort to edit to become an acceptable shot.
5. Undesirable background or foreground elements that are difficult to remove.
6. Normal RAW shots of clients are kept for a period of 3-6 months before they are eventually deleted permanently. Only signature and good shots of their album will be kept.
At the end of the day, I find myself with less photo archives to manage, and I like the idea of organising my archives.
Any comments / feedbacks / suggestions? Do let me know! :)
