Why do I keep a vast archive of 2nd and 9th rate shots?
Rest assured, it's not in the vain hope that anyone except me will ever want to look at them! They are archived away on a spare machine, and only my ruthlessly-pruned collection of "keepers" stays on my laptop and goes everywhere with me.
There are two main reasons. First, as a record. Rarely, but more often than you'd think, I need to know something about a sequence that I can't tell from the shots I keep. Example: I show someone a nice picture of a Red-capped Robin. "Wait", they say, "that's Jackie Winter". Fair enough, from some angles, it can be very difficult to tell them apart. If need be, I can go back to the reject shots and find a different angle that will confirm (or refute!) my ID. Another example: Someone said that there hadn't been any Rainbow Bee-eaters is a certain district this year, where they are usually recorded every summer. Biologically, this is significant. I *thought* I could remember seeing them there. Again, I can go back through the archived files and even a terrible shot can tell me what I need to know. Third example: if I go to somewhere and want to make a note of the spot, I take a quick picture of a signpost, or the readout of a GPS. Obviously, I don't want that ugly shot messing up my nice collection of birds and wildflowers, but one day I'll want to go back there or tell someone about this great spot in Western Australia I discovered in '04, so I call up the files on the spare machine and remind myself of the details. I guess I refer back to the archives for one reason or another once every month or two, on average. I don't take field notes as a rule so it really is useful to me.
Second, much more important, reason. Time. As I'm sure we all know, pruning out the worst shots and sorting out the keepers takes forever. I constantly battle with my collection, ever so gradually improving it by discarding the worst shots. I guess we all do. It's stressful.
One thing that helps me make faster, more efficient decisions is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that nothing I do is irreversable. I never delete a shot, only move it to an archive. I can, if I need to, change my mind - and I can be 98% certain about a shot in less than a second, where to be absolutely 100% certain that I will never, ever regret deleting that particular picture takes 5 or 10 times longer than that. So I can flick, flick, flick through a shoot discarding the 2nd best shots as I go, happy that when I do make a mistake I can always recover from it.
Sure, I could go through the archives later, deleting anything that is absolutely, for certain useless. But why? Storage is so cheap, and time is money. I can earn enough to pay for a couple of dozen 400GB hard drives in the time it would take me to sort through every last picture in the archives on a single drive, making certain that there is nothing I will ever want on there before I delete it all.
But if I fall under a bus next week and someone elects you to save my pictures for posterity (maybe Arthur Morris was busy that week and you were the next best choice), here's a tip for you: don't even bother looking on the desktop machine, just take the files off my laptop: all the good ones are on there. (And backed up in about five different places, of course.)
Anyway, that's my method. I'm not for one moment suggesting that it would suit everyone, just throwing it in for discussion.
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