Photo Edit­ing 101 — Sur­viv­ing The Tidal Wave Of Data

I can’t believe it is nearly 2 years since I last tack­led the thorny issue of photo rat­ing, but as I wade through my cur­rent cat­a­log I feel a fresh rewrite is due, with a not small level of inspi­ra­tion from this excel­lent and timely piece on the painful process of sort­ing / reject­ing pho­tos by Scott Rinck­en­berger over on the Chase Jarvis blog.

I can really asso­ciate with this bit in particular:

Painful mem­o­ries I have: My first breakup, my first deceased pet, my first time mov­ing, but per­haps most painful of them all is this; my first attempt at edit­ing 15,000 pho­tos. Such over­whelm­ing vol­ume, such slow progress, so many sim­i­lar pho­tos. Why, oh why, did they ever cre­ate the motor drive!?

My cur­rent photo library sits at approx­i­mately 13,500 images, and all but about 1,000 are per­sonal, and carry with them some level of emo­tional con­nec­tion. Delet­ing, or oth­er­wise con­sign­ing to the dig­i­tal rub­bish bin is so hard, espe­cially since my lit­tle boy arrived on the scene!

A Canon 7D shoots 8x18MP photo’s a sec­ond… something’s got to give.