Of course there is always the question of what to put up (preserve for posterity)... in other words, not "this is me and my girlfriend in front of the Eiffel Tower" or "look what a great party we had"...

I tend to look for passing the bar on three counts - first, is it a subject of historic/cultural/educational interest - many older pix of known artists on stage (or candid off stage shots, or ancillary stuff such as instruments of some interest, or other material illustrating folk traditions) can satisfy this criterion, particularly if they are a record of a particular time and place that will not come again, and/or no-one else was taking photos at the time.

Second, am I happy with the image from an artistic/aesthetic nature - for example, if I took half a dozen similar shots, which one do I like the best? Do I choose just that one or several, or put them all up including the lesser ones? (Typically it is one or a few, generally not all; culling the poorer ones makes the others look better, in general!)

Third, what about technical quality (focus/clarity, graininess, contrast, colour balance etc.) In my experience to date, the best ones for technical quality were the ones that made it to my photo albums back in the day (black-and-white ones were hand printed and corrected/improved to taste via darkroom practices at the time). These are generally the first batch I uploaded over the years 2016-2019 or so. However more recently I have been revisiting some of the ones I never printed, or colour shots that stayed unsorted in the box, and found that either my opinion of their quality or historic interest had changed, or that with newer digital techniques I could produce better "fair copies" than I previously thought possible, so quite a few of these have now made it to my online postings, hence the more recent 50 or more images uploaded.

A final category is artists/performers for whom I have original video recordings but not stills. Pre-digital age these are normally on Betamax, with a small number on VHS and/or Video 8 (or second generation transfers of the same). These present a problem in that the resolution of those formats is rarely more than 250 horizontal lines, compare 500-odd for a DVD and 1000-odd for Blu-Ray, meaning that they are pretty low resolution images to start with, before considering other aspects such as video noise, poor colour range etc. However in a few cases, they are the best I have got, I like the artists concerned, and nobody else is putting up similar content. So I have gone ahead and put up the odd one of these as a frame grab off my PC (plus minor image noise reduction etc.) after making a digital version of the video - see for example Kristina Olsen 1997 . I think this *just* creeps across the "technical quality bar" but opinions might differ! There is a kludge available to "improve" quality of such video frames, however, by joining several together to make a wider image - does not create any more horizontal lines but more vertical ones, which can give the illusion of a "better" image, see for example Wrigley Sisters 2002 or Jyotsna LaTrobe band (part) 1995 ... if there is a better method to create quality stills from (original poor quality) video files, I would be glad to investigate it.

Cheers Tony