Deleting 1,000 Photos a Day

This newsletter is going to be about the end-of-year (maybe end-of-decades of work) clean up. I wanted to start 2025 with everything leaner and working, including my health and hardware. Deleting a lot of my old work was part of the plan, but part of the plan was also to fix outstanding hardware issues or replace them completely.

First, I’m going to do a short rant.

A Solopreneur’s IT Rant

Being a solopreneur with a photography workshop business means you wear every hat, including the hat of IT. I really don’t like dealing with computers. It’s my least favorite part of doing photography. Over the last year, I’ve had to deal with a brand new high-end Dell desktop that has been nothing but trouble. It Blue Screens of Death after an extended period of sleep, like a couple of hours.

I bought the ProSupport plan for three years of support so I wouldn’t have to deal with being an IT expert, which I’m not. Over the last year, I’ve had a local technician, who is great, visit my house and replace multiple parts, including the processor, a hard drive, the motherboard, and nothing has fixed the BSOD problem.

Dell’s ProSupport team has had me reinstall the same drivers over and over and over. I’ve reinstalled Windows. If the computer goes to sleep for multiple hours, it Blue Screens of Death and then reboots and then goes to sleep for maybe 30 seconds, starts back up and cycles all my drives on for 30 seconds, goes to sleep for 30 seconds and repeats over and over and over until I turn it off.

I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent trying to do IT work to get this system to work. It’s frustrating. I know some of you will reply in the comments something about getting a Apple, but I don’t enjoy working on Apples, and I have boat design software that I use that only runs on PC. That said, I’m considering switching after all the IT issues.

I’ve also dealt with an OWC DAS system that loses data and crashes, and I’m now positive it is because of the Dell desktop. That took weeks of troubleshooting with OWC until they just didn’t reply to the support emails anymore. In addition, the Dell has trashed two of my hard drives. I just gave up on RAID and the DAS.

For awhile, I just turned off sleep and let it run — mainly because of the health issues I had earlier this year after getting covid and I didn’t have enough energy to deal with it. But I decided it needed to be fixed or just sent back to their corporate office and called a loss and get a computer that actually works. For the last month, I’ve had to spend about a week of my time troubleshooting the computer with their support team. Seemingly with no progress. I don’t know how many hours of my life I’ve wasted on this computer. Finally, they wanted me to do one more thing, and then they said that they’d send files from my computer to an advanced team.

And that fix didn’t work. After I told them that, Dell’s ProSupport deleted the ProSupport thread and closed it out even though it didn’t fix the problem. Then they somehow turned off the ability to start a new support request in their SupportAssist application. This computer was a lot of money, and I’m stuck without support I paid for and without a Dell computer that actually works.

I’m at the end of my rope with them. The thing is that I had a Dell Alienware desktop as my last desktop that I loved. I have a Dell monitor that I love. But it’s going to be hard to ever get a Dell again after this experience.

I’ll be looking for suggestions for a new computer if this next step doesn’t fix the issue.

Anyway…

Deleting 1,000 Photos a Day

As you can tell from above, I don’t like computers, and I don’t like sitting in front of a computer on most days. So, I’ve been lazy deleting photos when I import them. I’m so lazy that I have a Lightroom catalog of about 230,000 images. Many of those are duplicates, variations of waves, slightly different compositions, and images that I didn’t select because there was one in the set that was clearly better.

Back in the slide days, I’d toss a ton of slides, because if I didn’t I would have to label them, enter them into a database, and physically file them. With digital, you can basically import and forget them. Forgetting them adds up to terabytes of extra drive space. While hard drives are cheap these days, it’s a lot of wasted space.

Here is what a recent moonrise over the Grand Marais lighthouse shot looked like on my computer. You’re only seeing one screen of many. You can see at the bottom that I selected the best image. It had the lighthouse light on and the moon was centered exactly where I wanted it. The reset were just off a touch.

There was no reason to keep all those other shots, because out of all of them there was a clear winner.

The above screenshot, of photos from a moonset shoot the morning after my first example, shows a quick way to flag photos for deletion and then delete them. In Lightroom Classic, you can easily delete “Rejected” photos by first flagging them as rejected. The keyboard shortcut is “X.” The way I do this is turn on Caps Lock before doing this exercise, because after I hit “X” with Caps Lock on it will advance to the next photo. There I can hit “X” again or I can hit the arrow key to advance to the next photo.

After you finish flagging all the photos, you can hit Ctrl + Backspace (Windows) or Command + Delete (Mac), and it will select all the “Rejected” photos and give you the choice of removing them from the Lightroom catalog or deleting them from the hard drive and removing them from Lightroom. I delete them. Deleting them is permanent so make sure you really want to do it.

After selecting and delete, I’ll do this process again. After a few times, I ended up with the above photos from the two days of shooting moonrise and moonset. I deleted over 600 images and only the ones that I liked best or were good and unique remained. After I screenshot the above image, I went back in and further reduced the duplicate shots.

My two favorite images are below.

Not only is my hard drive lighter, but it’s also easier to find the good images from each shoot.

By doing this, I’ve also found images that I originally passed over due to other images that I liked better. For the shot below, there were two other shots from this area that I liked better. I ended up ignoring this one until I found it while deleting others. In this case catalog clutter hid goodness from view. Now from that same day, I have 10 shots that are all good and all unique. I’ve deleted everything else from the 100+ photos that I took of that waterfall that day.

The above is another example of an image that didn’t make the original cut from that day, but it was unique and lost in about 30 shots of this same composition with waves that I didn’t care for.

Lastly, leaving these photos in your catalog may inflate the idea of how many good shots that you have. I’d guess that I likely have about 20,000 good shots out of my 230,000 image catalog. In the future, I may aim for that total, so that if my family wants to keep my photos after I pass away they won’t have to manage a massive catalog of mostly bad shots.

So, my goal from now until the end of the year is to delete 1,000 photos a day every day that I’m in my office. Hopefully, I’ll be under 200,000 images in my catalog by 2025.

Until next time

That’s it for this week. You had a rant and a cleaning. I hope you enjoyed it.

If you’ve been following along for awhile, you know that one of my annual projects is making an eBook about my favorite photos. After a long delay, my Favorite Photos of 2023 eBook is available. You can buy it here. If you are a Facebook subscriber, you get it free. Here’s the cover. It has 60 pages, over 7,100 words and 29 photos. My 2025 calendar should be available to purchase in the next week. You can check this link to see if it is available: https://bryanhansel.com/calendar/

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in two weeks.