Sounds like you are not organized. Are all your photos tagged with location, long/lat, date, and subject matter? Can you in 5 seconds or less pull up every waterfall? Photo of a loved one? Every rainbow? Every trailhead?
I reference mine quite often, usually for a purpose I didn't originally think of. The name of that cool restaurant in a city you visit rarely? How about how many double rainbows did you get last year in June? Pinning down dates from a previous pet. Or the funny pet photo with a squirrel in it? Where were you on March 2nd when your credit card got charged for $1202.20? When did you meet your new significant other 3 years ago or so? What trail head was it that you saw a bear? What is the serial number, VIN, or similar for just about anything valuable you own... or owned. How old where you when you won that race?
The cost of a store a photo for life isn't much, seems silly to spend hours and hours trying to delete them, doubly so because mistakes will be made. Just tag them so you can find what you want. I was surprised how much tagging helped. Grand mothers poured over ever damn photo I tagged with the grand kids. Starting collections of wild animals we've seen by state. etc. When bored I find it rather fun to relive a vacation or hike. Even my kid seems to quite enjoy "visiting" places I've been.
Sure 95-99% of my photos don't get viewed, ever. So? Why waste man hours on useless photos, just make sure you are organized enough to find the 1-5% that you do care about.
I have not met a single person in real life this organized with their photos. People I know upload albums to Facebook (!) and forget about them; they might post some really good/momentous ones on Instagram. It’s truly amazing to me (in a good way) that one could devote so much time to organizing photos.
Not sure what OP is using for their photos, but Google Photos handles all of those mentioned features automatically for me. I’m sure there are other similar apps that do the same.
If you've got some system and software combo worked out that brings keeping your photos organised like this in line with the time cost of deleting then I think many many people would be interested in a summary.
Think of all the grandmas you would indirectly be providing more grand kid photos to!
I personally use https://www.digikam.org/ to keep my own photo/image library organized and tagged. It's also easy to embed a bunch of that data directly into the image file metadata, too. Like you, I enjoy the ability to easily call up entire categories of images at will/need with a simple keyword/location search. Really handy when I'm doin' graphics stuff (Blender 3D, Inkscape, GIMP, whatever) and want a particular type of image for some purpose.
> Can you in 5 seconds or less pull up every waterfall? Photo of a loved one? Every rainbow? Every trailhead?
For me that was the selling point of Google Photos. I switched in 2016 maybe - prior to that using Photos.app - and it was mind blowing. Thanks to machine learning, if you didn't think you wanted to tag waterfalls at the time of capture, it would still let you find them (I have 12 waterfall photos).
Unless you are a professional photographer, why waste man hours organising them when some algorithms and machine learning can do a good enough job?
I reference mine quite often, usually for a purpose I didn't originally think of. The name of that cool restaurant in a city you visit rarely? How about how many double rainbows did you get last year in June? Pinning down dates from a previous pet. Or the funny pet photo with a squirrel in it? Where were you on March 2nd when your credit card got charged for $1202.20? When did you meet your new significant other 3 years ago or so? What trail head was it that you saw a bear? What is the serial number, VIN, or similar for just about anything valuable you own... or owned. How old where you when you won that race?
The cost of a store a photo for life isn't much, seems silly to spend hours and hours trying to delete them, doubly so because mistakes will be made. Just tag them so you can find what you want. I was surprised how much tagging helped. Grand mothers poured over ever damn photo I tagged with the grand kids. Starting collections of wild animals we've seen by state. etc. When bored I find it rather fun to relive a vacation or hike. Even my kid seems to quite enjoy "visiting" places I've been.
Sure 95-99% of my photos don't get viewed, ever. So? Why waste man hours on useless photos, just make sure you are organized enough to find the 1-5% that you do care about.