Keep Only What You'll Use

Something I very much need to drill into my own routine.  If I come away with nothing in the next year but manage to accomplish this, I will feel like a huge success.  I don't even know how many thousands of digital images I have stashed away on my computer (since 1999 so you can imagine).  It's not so much about space these days, now that computers have more than ample hard drive capacity.  It's the simple matter of being organized and saving yourself time in the long run.  Months or years from now, who wants to sort through that extra 50%, 75%, or whatever, looking for that certain something?  So I will probably die without ever making this happen with everything from 1999, but starting NOW, here is the plan:

• Each and every time I go to load pictures from my camera, I will (at a minimum) quickly cycle through them on the big screen and delete any shots that are an obvious waste of time - the out of focus, the wrong angle, that gal who normally has such a nice smile but now managed to look as if she's ready to puke, etc.

• Then I will cycle through again, more carefully and decide things like this:  Of those 10 nearly identical shots, let's just see if we can't narrow it down to 2 or 3 keepers - or even 6 would be an improvement.  Discard the rest.  Why would you ever need them?   (Follow this advice if you like, but I'm really speaking sternly to myself here.  I can literally spend hours scrutinizing things to pieces and what a waste of time!  I could be out shooting more pictures or taking care of some worthwhile task that would otherwise suffer - like laundry!  So pick the first 3 or 4 that initially grab ya and be done with it!)

Now that we've got our keepers, we'll need to talk about how to best organize them, but that's for another day.