Fall colours in the Dolomites, Italy
Fujifilm GFX100S II, Fujinon GF100-200mm F5.6 R LM OIS WR, f11 @ 1/50 second, ISO 200

If you’re like me, you travel somewhere and come home with literally thousands of photographs. For a couple of weeks in Italy this year, shooting a combination of travelogue and landscapes, I took 3500 frames. However, if I’m shooting wildlife I could easily take that number in one or two days.

What do we do with all these photos?

Most of my raw files sit on a hard drive, never used, but I look at the files I don’t use as being practice runs for the photos I do use. If I knew which shots were going to be the keepers, I wouldn’t need to take the others! As the trip progresses, I use a star rating to indicate the photos that have potential, so by the time the trip finishes, there are usually a couple of hundred one star files. But 200 is too many. Too many to edit. Too many to share.

So I trim them down to just the ‘best’ photos. I find myself aiming for around 50 images with 4 stars. It might get down to 24 or 36 and that’s okay. There’s also a time equation involved: a photo that I can see has potential might simply be taking too long to resolve, so it loses its four star rating.

Now, being a self-centred baby boomer, this final edit of around 50 photos is primarily for me. I might turn them into a book or an AV, but I know that if people ask me to show them some photos from a trip, in a social context, they won’t last the distance.

So if you’re out with friends or family and they ask to see some of your photos, how many? I’m pretty sure people will look at 6 images and, if they’re good (the photos and the viewers), I might keep their interest for 12 photos – so that’s currently my magic number.

I rarely come back from a trip with just six images I want to show – there are always more, but I don't think more than 12 will work. I’m begrudgingly accepting there’s no point showing people too many images because it’s just awkward for both of us. They don’t want to offend me by not looking at all the photos, so instead they offend me by flipping through them too quickly!

Photographers are sensitive souls! And 12 seems like a good number.