Downsizing Your Digital Photos

You’ve got your photos off your camera and organized in folders or in your software. Now you’re working on an album, a display, or some photo project. Now is the time to be in the editing stage, when you’re choosing which you’ll include in that project. There’s no sense editing photos you’re not going to use, right? While you’re correcting red eye, cropping, cloning and such, you may as well edit down, or downsize, the number of photos you have.

Downsizing will do two things. Reducing the number of images you have will save space on your hard drive. Deleting from your library will also save time, because you—and all your peeps—will have fewer bad shots to pour through. You can spend your precious time better by enjoying the prize shots, yes? So let’s get to it.

We’ve always found it easier to downsize in retrospect, a while after the event. Or maybe you like to do it as soon as you take the picture and review it. The earlier the better.

Blurry shots: Blurry photos never get less blurry. These aren’t fun for anyone to look at—why make someone dizzy?

Duplicates: How many photos of a battleship do I need? We try to pick out the best one to tell the story, preferably with someone in the shot to give perspective and interest. All other duplicates…delete! 

Bad shots. While you’re looking for the best photos of your event, it’s easy to pick out the ones you don’t want—those with facial expressions askew, eyes closed, heads turned, etc. You’ll want to delete those. It’s like the rule for clutter: look at and put it where it belongs, handling only once. In this case, it belongs in the trash. Exception: The bad shot may have the one good expression of a subject, and you may want to clone that face from the bad shot to the better one. In that case, keep the photo but delete other less-than-stellar shots.

Meaningless shots. In hindsight, you may wonder why you took the picture of that tiny stream. Or the butterfly whose wings you can’t see. Scenic shots are fine, but many lose meaning after the picture was taken. Again, if the photo doesn’t help tell the story of the event, delete.