Lightroom: Deleting Photos

There are two type of photographers:

1. The photographer that keeps everything. Out of focus, fuzzy, failed panning, the Eiffel Tower sticking out of the head…
2. The photographer that deletes everything that is not worth at least one star. World tour: 6 month and only 125 photos to show for it.

I tend toward the second type of photographer, but I control myself better. I recently did a “one month” trip to the Eastern Arctic, my keepers amount to 192, but I only delivered 78 photos. These are the ones delivered to the client.

My flow is:

1. I check the focus, sharpness… I do not use Lightroom since I have to import them and I do not want to import anything that is out-of-focus, fuzzy… Most of the times, I use AfterShot Pro from Corel which allows me to view the images without importing. Sometimes, I use Faststone or IrFanView. And then I delete these out-of-focus, fuzzy… photos.
2. I import all the other photos in Lightroom., build the 1:1 previews…

There are 2½ ways of deleting photos in Lightroom:

1. The “wrong” way: Press the Delete key > Select Delete from Disk. Actually, it's not really the wrong way, but that's not the “good” way.
2. The “right” way: Press the “X” to flag the photograph as Rejected then move on to the next photo. And next until the next Rejected… When I'm done Rejecting all my photos, I filter my photos with the Attribute [1] Rejected [2]. Then I can review the photos before I really delete them.

Sometimes, I just flag the photos as rejected and do not delete them. They sit, sit and sit. I wimp, to delete or not to delete… aka wimping. Then eventually, I bite the bullet and Photo > Delete Rejected Photos...