This image is a great example of snapshots that still have value!
When practicing photography not all images are created equal. This is why our catalogs have a star and color tagging options. If every portfolio image is a 5 star image there are going to be a lot of 2-4 star images you take in-between. Since you only want to display your best work there is a way of avoiding ‘wasting’ the rest of your catalog.
Selling images on micro stock websites isn’t the most exciting of things, but it can lead to some nice opportunities! We aren’t talking about large amounts of income for most people, but it isn’t unheard of to get enough each month for a couple cases of beer with a small catalog of images online. I only have a few hundred on one micro stock website, but it is normal for me to see $10-20 a month while putting virtually zero effort in.
Aside from a small passive income, you can also learn a lot from the images you take that don’t make it into the portfolio or on print. They are great tools for studying why a particular composition didn’t pan out like you had hoped. Perhaps after examining some of the failures you have had more closely you can start to improve the number of successes you have in the future!
If neither of those ideas work out for you though, there is one helpful thing you can do with these images that will improve your mood! Since they didn’t pan out for one reason or another you can free up some disk space by deleting them. Now, I am not trying to be rude here because if you are running low on storage or the read/write speed isn’t that high anymore, this will actually help you out by doing both!