Quality Over Quantity

I can't tell you how many times I have flipped through photos on Facebook, Flickr, or an email and been annoyed by the sheer volume of photos.  It's one thing if you have 200 photos that are equally fascinating and totally different from one another, but that's rarely the case.  There is nothing more boring than looking at a Facebook photo album that has 50 photos in a row that look almost exactly the same.  As dull as albums like this are, they are shockingly common on the web, which is why I'm dedicating a post to this topic.

The bottom line is: KNOW WHEN TO DELETE.  If you take 10 photos of the same thing, even if they are all good, you either need to:

a) Pick a couple favorites and delete the rest.  It will save you computer memory space.

OR

b) If you really can't let go of the photos forever, pick a couple favorites to upload and leave the rest on your computer.

I'm guilty of doing this myself.  There have been times when I've uploaded similar photos and created some redundancy on my Facebook or Flickr accounts.  However, I periodically go back and weed the not-so-spectacular photos from both my online albums and iPhoto on my computer.  If you go back later you often find yourself much less attached to photos you couldn't let go of weeks or months ago.

As an example, I will use some pictures that I took yesterday to demonstrate how to choose.  Yesterday afternoon, my mother made cupcakes and I took the opportunity to take pictures of them and some of the sprinkles she had spilled on the counter.  As usual, I took many similar shots (see my earlier blog post on this topic) to ensure that I got a shot I liked.  Here are three unedited shots of sprinkles that I took:

Now, a lot of people would keep all three of these and add them back to back to an email or online album.  Understandably, this gets really old, really fast.  Who really needs to see three nearly identical close-up shots of sprinkles?  One is plenty.  So, I chose my favorite, edited it, and uploaded that shot to my various online albums.  Now, I can delete the others and de-clutter my iPhoto album as well as free up memory on my laptop.

To put an end to this little rant, please do not bore your friends and family with repetitive photos.  You're much better off with a 15-photo album with unique, well-taken pictures than 300-photo album that looks like the world's worst flip book.