Initializing an effective dictionary is an indispensable step for sparse representation. In this paper, we focus on the dictionary selection problem with the objective to select a compact subset of basis from original training data instead of learning a new dictionary matrix as dictionary learning models do. We first design a new dictionary selection model via l2,0 norm. For model optimization, we propose two methods: one is the standard forward-backward greedy algorithm, which is not suitable for large-scale problems; the other is based on the gradient cues at each forward iteration and speeds up the process dramatically. In comparison with the state-of-the-art dictionary selection models, our model is not only more effective and efficient, but also can control the sparsity. To evaluate the performance of our new model, we select two practical web media summarization problems: 1) we build a new data set consisting of around 500 users, 3000 albums, and 1 million images, and achieve effective assisted albuming based on our model and 2) by formulating the video summarization problem as a dictionary selection issue, we employ our model to extract keyframes from a video sequence in a more flexible way. Generally, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both these two tasks.