Probably the greatest challenge of digital photography is the ability to easily
take bad pictures. Like weeds in the garden, your great shots will quickly be overrun and hidden by the volume of other photos. Taking the time to decisively review and delete photos now will save you hours of time in the future.
For example: Suppose you take several group shots at a family gathering. You narrow it down to two or three great photos. What to do? My recommendation: pick one and remove the other two.
Why? If you agonize over this decision now, you only need to do it once. Otherwise, you will have to revisit it again and again, each time you consider using these pictures for a project or slideshow.
This discipline is the key to making it easier to find, manage and edit your photo library. It lets you focus on quality and saves you countless hours of work. Your enjoyment increases as you can easily search and find great shots in your library as it grows.
Still having trouble deciding what to delete. Here are some tips:
- Remove all duplicates
- Remove all poor quality shots
- Remove anything that doesn't add value to the story
I would even encourage you to revisit your library from time to time to do some additional weeding. For example, I like to do a year end review and see what can be removed from the collection of photos for that year.
Picasa provides some great features to help you review, compare and delete pictures in your Review Folder:
