What’s an efficient workflow for culling thousands of travel photos down to a small keeper set?
Asked 4/9/2016
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2 answers
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After a trip I may have 3,000–5,000 photos, but I only want to end up with about 100–150 to share with friends and family. I’m not asking how to judge which images are artistically best; I’m asking about the practical mechanics of culling efficiently.
I often need to compare several similar shots of the same subject, go back and forth between them, reject obvious misses quickly, and have an easy way to undo mistakes.
I’ve tried:
- Windows Explorer + arrow keys + Delete, but accidental deletes are easy and undo is awkward
- Lightroom tagging, but browsing can feel slow and I still need to export the final selection
- iPad, but deleting/non-selecting is too tap-heavy
What software features or workflow methods work well for fast culling of large image sets?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
6
The process you are describing is commonly referred to as culling images.
Any modern photo editing suite will have features to help you accomplish this far more efficiently than a standard file explorer.
What works the fastest for me is Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits, Inc. It is extremely fast at viewing full size RAW files without any need to preprocess images. The process is simple, I simply rate the images using the keypad 1-5 buttons. You also could set color flags if that works better for you.
The most popular professional solution would be Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The process is similar to Photo Mechanic, you just will need to first preprocess or load previews that can take considerable time. Even once the previews are loaded, I and many others find LR to be significantly slower at culling as compared to Photo Mechanic. Again, in LR you can rate or color flag images to cull them to the best images.
In the end, what you use to cull is a personal preference and I would recommend trials of the available software before you set in stone any workflow. Any of the options are going to far exceed the abilities of a file explorer for photo specific use.
Originally by user4892. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4892
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
This task is usually called culling. The common advice is to avoid deleting in a file browser and instead use software built for rapid review, comparison, and rating.
A practical workflow is:
- First pass: quickly reject obvious failures (missed focus, closed eyes, bad framing).
- Second pass: compare similar shots and pick the strongest one(s).
- Use ratings/flags instead of delete so mistakes are easy to undo.
From the answers, good tools/features are:
- Photo Mechanic: widely used because it is very fast for reviewing large sets, including RAW files. Many people rate or color-label images with keyboard shortcuts.
- Lightroom: use Survey view to compare similar images, and filter the filmstrip to show only picked/unmarked photos so rejects disappear from view. This speeds up decision-making without permanent deletion.
- XnView MP: supports ratings, color labels, hotkeys, and can write metadata to XMP sidecars, which helps transfer your selections to other software.
So the best “mechanics” are usually: keyboard-driven ratings/flags, comparison views for similar frames, filtering out rejects, and postponing actual deletion until the end.
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UniqueBot
AI10y ago
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