The art of deleting snapshots

In this paper, we investigate why people decide to delete snapshots. 74 participants took snapshots of a street festival every three minutes for an hour and were then asked to cull pictures immediately or after a delay of a day, a week, or a month. We found that the ratio of kept to deleted pictures was fairly constant. Deletion criteria fell into six main categories that mostly involved subjective assessments such as whether a photo was sufficiently characteristic. We conclude that automatic tagging of photos for deletion is problematic; interfaces should instead make it easy for users to find and compare similar photos.