CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Get a tool that immediately renders the 1:1 pixel-level details. That tool is not Lightroom Classic unless you have just completed a running of the batch processing to create the 1:1 previews.

This is an older thread. I assume Fast Raw Viewer has already been mentioned for culling. That's what I use. I primarily only look at the 1:1 details, typically at the center of the image, even for compositions where the AF as elsewhere. I can tell in 1-second at the 1:1 level whether this image is a <delete> or possible keep. Run through them at the 1:1 (100% zoom) and delete everything even remotely out of focus. This will remove 50% to 80% of your images in 1-second x total images reviewed.

A second pass then is only looking at what might be in focus, where it gets very much easier to find just the keepers and trash the rest.

When you have a lot of good ones and the best is hard to find from the unprocessed RAW. Then, use the 1:1 previews inside LR and use the Compare tool to look at two candidate images at a time.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

The way to approach a big project is to break it into small pieces and address one piece at a time.

More than a decade ago I had amassed around 65,000 images in my photopile. That included originals, various edits of the originals, duplicates, several shots of the same thing, even some OOF shots and accidental shots of my foot. I decided to take action to weed them out.

The first thing I did was to get them all into Lightroom. I then made a new copy of the root folder with all the images in it and put it into a backup location. I then made several smart collections based on the year of capture. I then took each year's collection and exported it as a separate catalog. That gave me one catalog for each year.

I then took the first year catalog and went through it, deleting duplicates and pure junk. I then took all the photos and placed keywords on each of them. Since I had all the photos backed up, I would delete the photos from the catalog and the disk. When I was done sorting that year I moved on to the next.

The process took a couple months, working in available free time. I kept a sheet of paper with the years listed on it and crossed out a year when I was done. If I got partway through a year, I looked at the library in grid mode. The display gives numbers for each image, so I just wrote the number of the image where I stopped on the sheet of paper. When I got some more time to work on it I started at that number and continued. I could then write the next stopping number on the paper.

The early years were easy because there were few images. As I got used to digital, there were more and more images so the later years took longer than the early ones. But eventually I got through them all.

Now I had several catalogs, one for each year. I took the first one, copied it on the disk and gave the copy the name 'Master Catalog YYYY' so I have a single catalog up to the current year (YYYY). It only has one year's worth of images in it, but now I can import the other annual catalogs. That gives me a catalog with all the images sorted and keyworded. Instead of 65,000 the new master catalog had about 15,000 images.

Now, in January of every year I copy my master catalog and change the name to reflect the current year. The old catalogs go into backup.

I don't believe it is necessary to inspect every image down to the pixel level. That may be important when looking at duplicates, but for the most part you want to keep (1) family photos that are unique; (2) photos that would be difficult to reproduce later; (3) photos that show something you want to remember; (4) wall hangers.

Another possibility is to place color labels on images that you particularly like and want to perfect. When I now import the images from a shoot, I do triage right away. I usually import all the photos, and in the library view I can look at the most recently imported images. I go into loupe view (full size image) and start looking at the images. The ones that look like they might be keepers get a red color label. You can place a red color label on an image just by pressing '6'. When I get through all the images I can sort by color label and just look at the red labelled images and start working on them. You could do a similar thing when sorting all your old images. 6 places a red label on an image, 7 for a yellow label, 8 for a green label, and 9 for a blue label. That gives you 5 possibilities: 4 color labels and no label. (This is more fully described in https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1584).

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Don't make things more complicated just because you can. I have a single master catalog with about 95,000 images. It's been roughly this size for a few years, since a mass-import of legacy digital images and film scans about 6 years ago. Digital goes back to around 2006 and film scans now go back to the late 70s.

All my images on disk were already in YYYYMMDD folders before I even purchased LR. The only time an LRCAT with 95K images presents an issue is the LR back-up process. I only run this once a week, and always when I know I'll be away from my computer for 2+ hours, so typically overnight.

All images in one LRCAT gives me instananeous access to all my digital photography assets. I have not properly culled / re-edited all the older images, nor added keywords, nor placed into collections. I initially worked on them in years, older first. Then sometimes on topics. I'd guess I'm not even 50% through all that legacy work. Everything was edited originally, but my 2022 eyes would be more aggressive in culling and many images would benefit from a more experienced hand in editing. Now, only if I have a purpose to revisit those images, do I enaged in that rework. Someday I'll finish, but of late, I'm having trouble keeping up with current work.

azemon Loc: Saint Charles, MO, USA

I am a Linux user so my workflow is completely Adobe free. You can use these programs on Windows and MacOS, too, I suppose.

1) I use digiKam to import photos from the memory cards. I have it store them in directories (a/k/a folders) by year and month. It also renames the files by date-time taken. E.g., pictures/2022/2022-10-18_17-55-32.nef or ...jpg.

2) digiKam is my catalog so I use it to tagging, facial recognition, etc. It also has the ability to edit geolocation data so I can add it if I forgot to run Snapbridge and get the GPS data into my camera. Annoying but pretty quick to fix. At this step, I delete the photos which are obvious trash.

3a) For quick editing, I use digiKam's built-in editor. It is fine for cropping, simple exposure tweaks, etc.

3b) I do my serious editing in rawtherapee (regardless of whether the image is JPEG or NEF). One of the best things about it is that it saves a sidecar with each saved image file. The sidecar contains all of the settings for all of the tools. This makes it trivial to apply all (or a subset) of the edits from one photo to a bunch more photos taken in the same session. It also makes it trivial to return to a photo later and change just one thing, e.g., recrop from 11x14 to 4x6.

4) Back to digiKam to add my watermark because rawtherapee doesn't have a watermarking tool.

-- Art Z.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

Does your camera not store date taken in the EXIF data, and does your photo cataloger not have the ability to access any of the dates in the metadata for sorting, lookup and so on? It never ceases to amaze me how many people rename perfectly good, unique camera created filenames into dates, and store files in folders by date. I'd think any photo catalog app would make all that a waste of time. My old cell phones named files by date, what a mess and harder to manage. I guess it makes some sense if one doesn't use a catalog app, but that makes no sense to me either, unless you don't keep many photo's around.

bkwaters

Cool. I will give it a spin. BTW, for fun, try Lilidog Linux.

azemon Loc: Saint Charles, MO, USA

Of course the camera does and of course digiKam lets me access photos by date. I learned long long ago that it helps immensely to have photos sorted grossly into buckets and for each photo to have a unique name, even when using multiple cameras. A simple example is when I want to share a bunch of photos with someone else, e.g., when I take pictures at a friend's wedding. I can copy the files onto a thumb drive, hand him the drive, and he has something sane to look at without any special software.

Anyway, it works for me and it's zero effort to have digiKam create one directory per day and rename each photo as it is imported from the memory card.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

To each there own of course. I understand your reasons, but methods not so much. Your camera does give you unique names for each photo. I get renaming the photo's if you have multiple camera's using the same names. I have that issue with cell phones. My LG and Samsung's used the date for filenames, so I put them in separate folders. I've always kept others photo's in their own separate folders, so that's not much of an issue. Now our iPhones all give the files a IMG_nnnn prefix. I do rename the prefix on my cell phone pics to IP_xxxx, that way I can't mistakenly overwrite one of my photo's with someone else's. I'm fairly sure that is solutioning looking for a problem though, but I reckon it doesn't hurt.

If I have pictures of say a friends wedding, I make a keyword for "Friends Wedding" and I can instantly have my cataloger pull out all of them and do whatever with them. I'd think creating a directory for every day you take pictures would result in so many directories it would be a nightmare. If I only took pictures one day a week, I'd have over 2400 folders? One a day would be over 17,000 folders.

Photo catalogue apps should (mine does) make most of that unnecessary, and is pretty much the purpose of a photo catalogue application.

Anyway, I like hearing what and why people do what they do, particularly why. When you said you were a Linux guy my ears perked up. I ran and administered a Unix System 7 for many years and I like when I hear someone runs a Linux system.

azemon Loc: Saint Charles, MO, USA

Brother!!! I administered a UNIX v7 system way back in the 1980s. I thought I was the only one who remembered that. It was pretty cool that the entire documentation set fit into three 1-inch binders.

As for the photos... yeah... I've still got two cameras and I use them interchangeably on the same shoots. For example, sometimes I'll have my long telephoto on the Z50 and a less extreme lens on the Z5.

Cheers,
-- Art Z.