Samantha Chrysanthou and Darwin Wiggett recently posted on their blog that they had decided and agreed (it was Samantha’s idea and Darwin decided to go along) to a June 30 deadline to either process their unprocessed files or delete them.  Delete as in gone.  Forever.  Their reasoning is that having so many unprocessed images was limiting their creativity by creating “clutter” and that Samantha “CAN’T STAND the idea of going out to shoot with hundreds of images just waiting for me back home.”  Samantha had 89+ folders and Darwin nearly 200 folders dating back to 2005.  Rather than me copy and paste their comments, you need to read the several (so far) posts on the subject to get the whole idea.

 In their posts they refer to the concept of Minimalism, which is one that Kathy & I have been exploring lately.  Part of the goal of downsizing to our new home was to rid ourselves of physical “clutter” that we had been making space to store and making time to think about.  There’s nothing like facing the prospect of moving all that “stuff” to make one wonder how much of it is really necessary.  And parsing all of it down to just the essentials for living in an apartment for 6 months really made us think about how much of that stuff would ultimately survive the move.  Suffice it to say that we’re glad to have a Goodwill store close by.

I’ve never given all that much thought to my digital backlog.  I have a very well thought out method for sorting, categorizing and rating my photos so I always know the status of a given image based on the Pick status, color label and star rating.  Having unprocessed files doesn’t bother me.  In fact, I will sometimes go back into the archives and see an image that, for one reason or another, I missed or passed over the first time or two through the folder.  I’ve reasoned that as long as I have captioned and keyworded my photos, if I ever needed to process one I would, and if I never did?  No big deal.

For a while I felt like I needed to have a goal of processing every single one of my “Picks.”  And I actually have processed many of my files from the early digital days, starting around 2004.  What I have done, though, is when I’ve gone through and made my Picks I remove the non-Picks from the Lightroom catalog while leaving them on my hard drive.  I have nearly 32,000 images in my Lightroom catalog, but many multiples of that number reside on my hard drive.  It’s not that I think all of those “rejects” might be valuable as much as I figure with as cheap as hard drives are there isn’t a lot of point in deleting them.

So I’m not judging anyone else’s decisions or their workflow, but I’m pretty comfortable with my “system” and it doesn’t bother me to have unprocessed photos.  But it was obviously something they considered to be important, and more power to them.  Not all “clutter” is visible, and if something is hampering their creativity, addressing it in the way that works for them is the right approach.  I’ll be interested to see how they did come June 30.