Keep or Trash?

With the digital camera era, every photographer tends to shoot more pictures. The limitation we have is directly tied to the storage capacity on hand. But then that adds another problem - how do we manage storage on our hard disk.

Here is a article that talks about one of the work flows that this photographer follows to find his keepers. "How to make your photos better by deleting them" - here he uses Adobe Lightroom to organize and identify his keepers.

I typically use Nikon Capture NX for most of my minimal processing and use a RED, YELLOW & GREEN tags to classify my images. I start with ViewNX and browse through my pictures. Flag out images with RED tag if I feel teh image will not be ultimately used. In my second round browsing, I identify images that may be used after minor processing (a crop, exposure value or sharpness adjustment) and flag these images with a YELLOW tag. In the third round I flag images that I feel are sure keepers and flag them with a GREEN tag.

At this point, the ratio of RED vs. YELLOW vs. GREEN on an average is 75 : 20 : 5 respectively. Now I fire up Nikon CaptureNX and start looking at the YELLOW tags, do some minimal processing and try to keep a few. All the keepers and processed images go to a new folder (RAW format). The images get converted from RAW to JPEG for printing or uploading them online. In about a month or whenever I need to conserve some hard disk space I come back and delete the RED tagged images or sometimes the original download folder.

On an average I keep 10% to 12% of the pictures I shoot, of which 1% or 2% are really good images (I don't determine this, but based on feedback & comments). So tell me what you think of this workflow. Do you have a workflow that you use?