There is no meaningful “normal” percentage. Your keep rate depends heavily on subject matter, shooting style, and how selective you are. Action and burst shooting usually create far more rejects than slower, deliberate work.

A practical rule of thumb is to delete clear technical failures first: badly out-of-focus images, unusable exposure mistakes, and accidental shots. After that, cull duplicates and frames with no strong subject or emotional value.

Beyond that, two valid approaches emerged:

• be ruthless and keep only the strongest images
• keep more than you think you need, because older photos can gain personal or historical value over time

A good compromise is to aggressively remove obvious failures, then archive the rest if storage and backup are manageable. What matters most is being able to find images later, so consistent tagging, keywords, folders, and ratings are more important than hitting a target percentage.

Some photographers later revisit older work and delete more once enough time has passed to judge whether an image still feels meaningful.