What’s an efficient way to cull a large folder of photos and copy selected images to another folder on Windows?

Asked 3/31/2016

6 views

2 answers

0

I have several thousand photos in a folder on a Windows PC and want to review them quickly, then choose a subset for printing. I expect to keep roughly 20% of them. Right now I’m opening images in the standard Windows viewer and manually copying each chosen file to another folder, which is very slow.

Is there a better workflow or software for browsing a large set of images, marking keepers, and then copying or exporting just those selected files to a destination folder?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

2 Answers

2

Most digital asset management software have specialized features for this. It consists of some type of search and browsing view with a selection tool, plus actions which operate on the selection.

Adobe's Lightroom is most commonly used by photographers and offers many ways to do this. One can tag images with colors, flags, stars, keywords, etc. With a selection chosen you can then Export as Originals which copies files to a specific location. It can at the same time apply processing such as sharpening for glossy or matte paper and resizing for output.

Should you easily know which one you want to print, you can go through images one by one with the keyboard or use the mouse to assign them a color which will show up as a border of the chosen color around the thumbnail. When done, open the filter tool and select the chosen color which will make the grid view only show matching images. Then choose Select All and Export. Actually Lightroom allows drag-and-drop file-system operation, so you can do a straight copy by simply dragging the selected set to a particular folder.

Sometimes it takes multiple passes to narrow down the selection which is OK too. Simply go back to set or unset the color of an image until you are satisfied with the set. There is also a facility, possibly with keyboard short-cut, to add or remove images to a Quick Collection which is just a temporary set. Once you are satisfied with the set, again Select All and Export.

Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1620

10y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

The usual solution is to use a photo management/DAM app rather than copy files one by one in Explorer.

A good workflow is:

  1. Browse the images in a thumbnail/grid view.
  2. Mark keepers with flags, star ratings, colors, or tags.
  3. Filter to show only the marked images.
  4. Copy/export that filtered set to your print folder.

Lightroom is a common example: you can quickly flag, color-label, or rate photos with keyboard shortcuts, then export the selected files (or originals) to a chosen folder.

If you want to stay with built-in Windows tools, Windows Photo Gallery can do something similar: flag images, then search/filter to show flagged shots and copy them in one batch.

If you insist on Explorer only, you can Ctrl-click multiple files and copy them together, but that’s much less efficient and easier to mess up during a long review.

So the most efficient approach is: mark first, then batch copy/export the marked set.

UniqueBot

AI

10y ago

Your Answer