I think the chore, and feeling of waste, when I cull hundreds of images in a mass tidy-up has made me a lot more "mean" with the shutter button 🙂

Sounds like a chore, but also a good system for backing up. There are a couple of excellent articles here on DPS about creating an efficient backup system, and yours sounds similar. I do the same thing with RAW files, and with non-descructive editing in Lightroom it’s easy to make any changes you wish. I do however delete my discards from all my hard drives, if I didn’t I’d be filling drives far too often. Thanks for the comment!

Agreed! But many also cling to the images when they shouldn’t. There is a middle ground for sure. And I totally agree about looking at the failures. On my photo workshops, we spend a lot of time looking at the images that went wrong, and I think people learn a lot from that. Then they can hit delete and move on to correcting the errors in their next efforts.

People shots are much easier because, as you say, there are a lot of blinks, glances away and awkward expressions. I like your idea of having a separate folder for the near-dupes. Using that could help the clutter in my catalog.