How to decide which photos to print?

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AlfaFoxtrot

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I'd like to get some of my photos printed from the last 12 months or so (taken quite a few of a wide variety of things). In Lightroom I rate all my photos purely on technical quality, or the quality of the content - and then from the 'goods' I flag a selection that I could show to anyone (eg in a slideshow), which removes duplicates etc.

However, even with this filtering I still have potentially hundreds of images to print, and it seems too much. I'll end up with several albums full, and my parents have probably got 1 or 2 from each year as we were growing up etc. I guess this is part of the digital era, where I can afford to take many many pictures (and have a reasonable % come out well!).

So my question is, when you print out photos for an album, do you just select the very best, or do you print everything?

Part of me is wondering if I had a 'best of' in print form then if anyone was interested enough I can show them the rest on the computer. I feel relatively strongly about having prints rather than everything on the computer, it's accessible to anyone, and you can leave an album on the coffee table - which you can't yet recreate with technology. But at the same time I don't want to have a room full of albums gathering dust because there are too many to look through.
 
Personally, i print very few. But i think youve almost answered yourself. you dont want rooms full of albums, but you do want prints. So go through your 'best' pics, create a quick collection or something in LR, and be extremely harsh on your pics, picking out only the 'very best' when youve done that once, go through that collection and be even more selective, repeat until you have enough for just 1 album lol.
 
I think another thing to consider is who will be seeing this album. If it's just for you then more often than not, some of the worst photos that came out blurry and overexposed can more accurately bring back the memories (maybe there was a reason it was blurry, etc), so don't just go through the ones you've rated as good.
 
I go through a multi stage filtering process. First, I get rid of the complete dross then I go through them again and get picky with the duplicates, keeping the best 2 or 3. At this point I get SWMBO to have a look and see which she thinks is the best (and worst!) to reduce the number again. By this point I tend to be down to about 50% of the original total if not less, so depending on how many pics there are, I look at the high street prices and get the shortlist printed. If there aren't enough to warrant a town visit, I tend to print them at home at 6x4. Now, we'll go through these enprints and pick out our favourites - these get special treatment and get printed at A4. Again, we'll look at these for a while and see if any deserve A3. Not many do!!!
 
I print out loads of pictures from snap shots to high quality photographs. I much prefer looking at a print than an image on a computer screen. I tend not to print anything smaller than A4 though
 
to me it's easy - I print anything that means something to me! Lots of my pictures looking back may well be technically poor, but are invaluable, because the people in them are no longer around.
 
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