Sounds like a chore, but also a good system for backing up. There are a couple of excellent articles here on DPS about creating an efficient backup system, and yours sounds similar. I do the same thing with RAW files, and with non-descructive editing in Lightroom it’s easy to make any changes you wish. I do however delete my discards from all my hard drives, if I didn’t I’d be filling drives far too often. Thanks for the comment!

Agreed! But many also cling to the images when they shouldn’t. There is a middle ground for sure. And I totally agree about looking at the failures. On my photo workshops, we spend a lot of time looking at the images that went wrong, and I think people learn a lot from that. Then they can hit delete and move on to correcting the errors in their next efforts.

People shots are much easier because, as you say, there are a lot of blinks, glances away and awkward expressions. I like your idea of having a separate folder for the near-dupes. Using that could help the clutter in my catalog.

Another thing to consider: we can learn a lot more from our failures than our successes. It’s good practice to hang onto the ‘rejects’ at least long enough to fully understand why they didn’t work. Of course, none of us likes to linger over photos we don’t like – but studying these can make us better photographers.

Thanks for your post!