What I learned from a friend who is a pro photographer is to make multiple passes. I'll try to do a quick one when I import into Lightroom to cull out unfocused or unsaveable images. Then I'll go through and cut out shots that are basically duplicates.[1] Then I'll go through and see which ones I want to develop further in Nik/Lr/Ps/etc. and star them.

Then I'm a battle royale optometrist, doing "a or b" an killing the weaker candidates.

Just getting in the habit of killing (or, at least cropping out the junk) the photos that you won't care about in the future is a good start. If you're looking at older photos and wondering "why did I take that," delete it right then. You don't have to have a clean desk right away, just shred the paper you don't need when it gets in your way.

[1] I've gotten into wildlife photography, so I often have a burst of ten shots of a bird in flight to get one that is really special.

Oh yes, I do that to a fault. That is, even of something static I will take at least 5-10 shots at least, just to get the one where the autofocus hit the nail on the head, and especially with hand held shots in low light. Multiply that for living things, which means hunting for the combination of good crop/focus and situation.

I am not pro by any means, but I am "vicious" about selecting and editing simply because it makes photography so much more fun for me, and the results pleasing to myself. It makes me feel okay instead of bad about the glass I bought, too ^^ I don't mind going back to old photos and changing tweaking the RAW conversion parameters either, and this way I don't have to obsess too much about getting it just perfect on the first go (because as you know, when you stare for too long at a specific set of things, you loose perspective, I find it rather more productive to step away from and then revisit things, but of course that's a luxury of not doing it professionally!).

So, I try to keep only 36 or 72 around, thinking of them as rolls of film. Unlike a roll of film that you brought back from vacation that only had a couple decent photos, these "virtual" rolls have 36 of your best shots.

You are not actually killing that person, or destroying that object; you are just deciding which one(s) of the photos of that moment or mood capture it best, and delete the ones which are just slightly worse variations of those.

It takes time though, that is a real cost. Though I think that time is made up for down the road, when you don't have to wade past the photos you deleted, or wait for them to upload/download/backup, etc... even a little bit of self-discipline adds up to quite a bit over a lifetime of digital photography. I think of it as removing weed so the flowers are more enjoyable, and have a greater probability of actually being seen (photographs are kinda useless when they are not seen other than by the bulge they create in the pagination; flickr is like a graveyard where good photos go to get overlooked in that way).

I've been doing this for a about 5-6 years now, so about 3 years ago I started deleting the raw shots a few months after having finished the film. To date I have not once regretted deleting a photo.

This doesn't fix the problem though. A tool to coalesce multiple sources and allow for easy sorting/editing with a way to them publish that result is really key here.

Who cares if it's a hobby or otherwise? You want a particular service and you don't want to pay for it. Options are naturally going to be limited.

> I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby

At a generous 5 MB per photo, that's 24,000 photos. You would have to take 65 photos, every day, for a year straight to reach those numbers. That's 1 photo every 15 minutes of your waking life for a year (assuming 8 hours sleep).

That's considerably a bit more than a 'hobby'.

At your levels, I consider $200/year rather reasonable for that level of obsession. The amount a traditional film camera user would have had to spend in developing and film costs alone for that level of usage would be astronomical.

The only quasi-reasonable complaint there is the long term storage costs of your high level of need. However, you're also making a special case of needing those photos 'everywhere'. Comparing to traditional photography there would have been no way to lug around 24,000 photos. They would have been stored, with the negatives, in an album somewhere. Kind of like sitting on a harddrive - which the going rate for 120GB is $25 (250 GB external for $50) as a one-time purchase cost.

I understand your desire to have everything digital available at all times and backed up against disasters, but there is going to be a cost associated with that.

And that cost is MASSIVELY cheaper, even at today's rates, than someone with your 'hobby' would have been spending trying to do the same thing, 10-15 years ago.

However, I do shoot in RAW which means each photo is in the 15MB to 18MB range. I also have JPG versions of each for sharing to friends and family.

As I intimated, last year was a bit of an aberration in that I took 4,500 (actually I took far more, I kept 4,500). I'm also a nerd which mean I am shooting in RAW, editing in lightroom, require access from lots of devices.

This isn't an unreasonable request, flickr allows me to upload, store, and organize all of these photos for a mere $25/year. I'd happily pay them a bit more to give me a great way to sync a local library to their servers in a seamless and understandable way.

However, YES I want them do the same for photos coming from phones, from multiple family members. I then want to be able to curate them natively on an iPad or PC and have that be represented elsewhere. Flickr is already doing the expensive bit, I'm looking for services on the client side to pair with them.

I'm not saying that people like me are a huge market, but almost everyone is taking more photos these days and it does need to be easier for people to manage their libraries. The solution I'm asking for ALMOST exists today, but nothing is quite there.

Is that generous? A RAW file from my SLR is about 20 MBytes. Many SLR's have larger RAW files. But using my "conservative" estimate that's 16 photos a day.

Considering the average photographer can snap 10 photos in about 3 seconds during a photo shoot this seems very reasonable to me.

If I were a pro photographer, shooting events like weddings or sporting occasions, I could easily hit 1000 shots in a day. I believe my company has about 10 TBytes of photography directly related to what we do, and that's from older DSLRs with smaller RAW files.

That's shooting one frame at a time, if you're bracketing or capturing sports, you'll be shooting many frames a second and the math gets all that more complicated. Of course you can delete photos, but it's extremely easy to fill hundreds of gigabytes even keeping only your best shots.

My pain is that I have a laptop and a desktop (not uncommon for photography. I want to be able to look at the photos on my laptop when on the road, but I also want these photos on the desktop (which can be hooked into a large NAS). If I make some edits on the plane those edits should sync to my desktop and vice versa, but I don't want everything both places--I probably only want the most recent shoot on my laptop along with whatever I choose to keep around (highlights from the past). I have to imagine Adobe's developers also see their laptops filling up, there has to be a better way.

(Btw, I feel Dropbox is an outrageously expensive solution to this.)

They've got an app to upload from your Android and iOS devices to the Synology. It's called DS Photo+. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeeZxa4N7NA#t=348s

Happy customer.

In any case, there are plenty of good existing pieces in play.

In fact, since I bought my NAS, I've yet to find a good use for it. Disk access is just too slow through the embedded CPU.

I use dropbox to back up important files and flickr is a backup for my photos. I'll be getting a NAS to provide at least some local fault tolerance for storing things like photos, music, and movies.

http://pcloadletter.co.uk/2012/01/30/crashplan-syno-package/

If I were dealing with that level of photography here's how I would consider setting it up:

I'd buy a home NAS and shove it full of disks (a Proliant Microserver can take 4x3TB drives easily, 6 if you want to get creative with ports and USB bootable sticks) and run it as a RAID-5 array. This cost me about $600-$700 a couple of years ago, drives inclusive. My array sits on a bookshelf, tucked away, almost silent (drives are the majority of the noise sometimes) and low-power. RAID gives it pretty decent durability so if you do get a hard drive freakout you're able to correct pretty easy. When one of my hard drives went dicky, I just ddrescue'd it across to a fresh drive then let the RAID array rebuild the bad data (RAID-Z is so sexy but that's another topic). You could probably just DD the thing and rely on the RAID checksums to do it or even just checksum the entire lot, depending on the volume of data.

Then I'd link Crashplan or Glacier to those folders and have it periodically diff/sync the data (e.g: overnight once a week/month). I don't have any such setup myself but I have read posts on forums from guys who have set this up as automated syncing of folders and they seem pretty happy with it. This is essentially an insurance against fat-fingeredness or your house burning down.

Now you have an offsite backup that is always relatively recent and an onsite backup that is free to access to your heart's content for modification through almost any medium. Yearly crashplan unlimited access costs $70 for a single device which is really all you're after, because your working storage is your NAS and the NAS is all that'll ever be touching the crashplan storage. I don't know Glacier pricing but I'd imagine that for some workflows it could be beneficial and for others it could be detrimental.

Dropbox can be set to sync with a subfolder so that if you take images on your iDevice or equivalent it automatically syncs them via dropbox to your NAS. Dropbox can also act as your working directory for any images you may be tinkering with on a remote device that can't just access the NAS outright. Rsync can be used to transfer files out of the dropbox folder to the main folder or to a 'to be sorted/postprocessed' folder on a periodic basis - essentially, every day you take a bunch of photos, that night it checks dropbox for those photos and shifts them out to free up more space. The NAS is a full linux install so it's flexible on what you can do.

The only downside I can see here is that you don't have every single image in the cloud, available to every single device at any given moment. I'm not sure if for your gigabytes of photographic memories that that's necessarily an issue, nor am I sure that if you're primarily editing stuff on a fullsized computer with e.g. Lightroom that is usually on the same network as the NAS, that it's a problem either. Sharing of data can be facilitated through a public dropbox folder that you just copy stuff in to when you want to share those images.

Anyway, from the perspective of someone who doesn't actually do this. I'm sure there's tools I don't know about that could slot in to this workflow and solve other problems that may affect some people. The beauty of it is given that the storage is yours, local to you and based on a full linux distro, you're free to do just about anything to it. Change backup providers? No problem, just resync all data. Workflow changes and you need a new feature? Find it and install it.

I look forward to hearing feedback on why this may/may not work for you :)

Finally, I'm keeping maybe 20% of what I take. The other 80% are being deleted.

Shooting in RAW takes up enormous amounts of space.

Because I like to keep my entire Aperture library on my laptop, I really have to watch disk space. For a time, I was floating over 200GB for my library until I forced myself to spend 20m a day for a few weeks culling. I'm still at 180GB but rate of disk space consumption of the library has slowed down significantly.

I try to keep 10% of my shots or less. These days, I only keep "high sentimental value" photos (regardless of how well they came out) and shots I'd consider putting into a printed album or on the wall. It means throwing out a lot of otherwise good pictures.

And now that Apple finally introduced "unofficial" support for Fuji's EXR sensors (it only took 2 years :( ), I've been shooting RAW on my X10, which are basically 18MB for 6MP images (it's complicated, there's pixel binning and other stuff going on, so the files are inordinately large).

Going RAW was actually a bit of a godsend - I was a digital hoarder that kept 80% of my files. It wasn't until I came to grips with the fact that I really only do look at 10% of them that I forced myself to overcome my hoarding mentality and start culling.

--sidebar--

I now use a USB gamepad to do my flagging for deletion on large photosets. I use a $5 app in the Mac App Store called Joystick mapper, and have mapped key operations to the game pad's buttons. If you're the console gamer type, you'll find yourself going through a set incredibly quickly by using a gamepad instead of mouse/touchpad plus keyboard.

10 photos of an event or place will do. 500 or 1000 are not necessary, even if you do it for the "memories". If the memories where worthwhile, a few pictures can evoke them just fine. If they were not, one million pictures wouldn't help.

>My daughter takes photos of her pets all the time, her iPhone is full all the time. They aren't great photos and they are highly repetitive but they are important to her.

Well, teach her how to keep the best photos too.

Take more and keep only the good ones would be a more reasonable strategy.

It drives my wife insane when I buy a professionally taken and professionally printed postcard for a buck instead of trying my hand at cruddy homemade pix, then again I get the last laugh because I'm having more fun and get more memories out of the experience...

Obviously if you are a pro or semi pro photographer or serious wanna be, you have to look at that as a job and disregard my suggestion. However if you can't experience life because of your "job" you should still find some way to experience life at an alternative time and place. Like if you miss one sister's wedding because you were there but were a photographer instead of a sibling, try to avoid being a photographer at the other sisters wedding or whatever, so at least you get the experience one time instead of missing out on both. Life moves fast, don't miss out.

But your point is definitely valid. With concerts probably being the worst example of this. It's depressing how many people are just staring into their screen trying to capture the moment, instead of experiencing it.

Also, auto bracketing for HDR (3 pictures per shot normally), RAW+JPEG and continuous shot modes all tend to generate a lot to store.