Not everything used to be bad. The film in the camera usually had 36 frames and was gradually exposed. After all, the film and every print was expensive. That’s history.
Digital photography is used to create huge amounts of photos every day. Only very few amateur photographers delete something from it. And so the mass of images in the cloud or on the computer is growing inexorably.
But something can be done about it. “I take photographs in a concentrated manner and prefer to produce fewer photos, but exactly according to my ideas and my quality standards,” says photographer Daniel Wollstein. “When I work, I orientate myself on analogue photography.”
If you want to keep track of your pictures, you have to observe strict photo hygiene. “For snapshots and memories, 200 photos a year are usually enough,” says Thomas Gerwers. “But they should be good.” In order to avoid sorting torments and data waste from the outset, the editor-in-chief of the specialist magazine “Profifoto” also advises that you also think about the photo before you take it.
Another tip: Always start looking at the photos immediately or at least the same day after taking the photos, advises Christine Bruns from the specialist magazine “c’t Fotografie”. Displays in the camera and smartphones are sufficient for a rough assessment. “I delete photos that are out of focus and photos that I don’t like,” says Bruns.
Thomas Gerwers chooses his photos according to technical criteria such as exposure and sharpness, but also according to his gut feeling. “A photo has to appeal to me and say something, then I keep it.”
This approach is of course subjective: “Photos can be very emotional and mean a lot to one viewer, while they are meaningless to the other.”
Basically, of course, only keep the best photos. With portraits, for example, you can make sure that someone has their eyes open and is generally well taken, says Gerwers. The assessment is easier shortly after the photograph is taken than later.
In order to bring more structure to the photo collection, metadata should be used, which are embedded in images as so-called Exif files. This happens partly in the camera or automatically on the smartphone, at least as far as the date and time are concerned. But the name of the author can also be useful.
Christine Bruns also recommends that frequent photographers write keywords in the metadata of the images using the photo program on the computer. These can be names of people, places, descriptions of motifs or even moods.
Short keywords, like those used as hashtags on Instagram
Christine Bruns also takes the trouble to give each photo file a file name appropriate to the occasion and save it in a folder of the same name. “It makes it easier for me to find the photos again years later,” she says. There is a separate subfolder for images in raw format (RAW) – if available – as well as for finished photo files.
Duplicates are deleted just as consistently as blurred or incorrectly exposed images. Procrastination and hesitation are out of place here: “I don’t mourn after a photo that I’ve deleted. Consistent selection usually fits,” says photographer Wollstein.
Photo management programs can support the selection process and often serve as a “digital darkroom” for image enhancement. With a star system, most programs allow you to gradually filter out the best photos.
First, all photos that you like are marked with a star. In the second round, the best photos receive two stars, the others go into the digital wastebasket.
This continues until in the fifth round only the best photos remain. “The star system makes work a lot easier and is a great help when making a selection,” says Thomas Gerwers.
Hobby photographers will find countless free photo management programs on the market. With “Adobe Bridge”, “Ashampoo Photo Commander Free”, “XNView” or the “Photos” programs integrated in Windows and MacOS, images can be viewed and sorted, and most of them can also be edited. The metadata can also be changed.
Purchase or subscription programs that recognize content and offer further processing options can also help when searching for specific images. These include Adobe Lightroom, Skylum Luminar Neo, Excire Foto, ACDSee Photo Studio, Cyberlink PhotoDirector 365, Zoner Photo Studio, and Magix Photo Manager Deluxe.
After training, you can recognize faces and assign people, so that you can sometimes do without metadata and instead filter photos according to certain criteria. The free “Google Photos” (up to 15 gigabytes of storage space) can also recognize people.
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