What do you use for culling file number down?

[Lemaildetom]

I have lightroom, even with 1:1 preview build on my raw file, I find the library mode fiddly for culling my file number down. I have a baby and sometime it's easy to take 1, 2 or even 300 times the almost same picture. What do you use for culling pre lightroom import?

 

[Jayst84]

The most efficient way by far, is to not take 300 photos of the same thing in the first place. Not overshooting will come with experience.

After that, personally I just use Lightroom. Edit in, rather than edit out. ie selecting the very best, as opposed to trying to get rid of the less good images, should speed things up.

There are plenty of other software options out there, but I don't see the point in paying for something else if you don't need it. Lots of press photographers for example swear by PhotoMechanic. They have a much greater need for keywording, captioning, and instant turnaround, than most folks though.

If I come back with 2,000 images from an event, I would aim to get that edited down and processed in Lightroom in about half a day. 200 shots of the same thing, I'd hope I could pick one and process it in a few minutes.

 

[juggler]

Faststone Image Viewer is free and very quick for culling - you'll need to enable tagging.
Perfect Browse is also quick though not free. It supports Lightrooms star ratings and colour tagging. It's a bit buggy though, I'm glad I got my copy free as part of a promotion.
Photomechanic is the industry standard for high speed work but overkill for my needs.

Edit in, rather than edit out. ie selecting the very best, as opposed to trying to get rid of the less good images, should speed things up.

This makes a HUGE difference but takes a lot of practice.

 

[redfan]

I shoot wildlife - birds in flight, dragonflies, deer etc - so I often have multiple copies of the same/similar shot. What I have started doing in auto-stacking by capture time - this will group photos taken within say 1 second (you can vary this) of another. I then collapse these stacks so I only see the photo at the top of the stack. Then for each stack, I view them in grid mode (in a 2x2 grid) and pick the best image to take into develop mode - the rest get flagged for deletion further down the line. The selected image is then put at the top of the stack, the stack collapsed and I move on to the next.

 

[Lemaildetom]

The most efficient way by far, is to not take 300 photos of the same thing in the first place. Not overshooting will come with experience.

I was slightly exaggerating to be honest, i'm not that terrible and i'm not a machine gun kind of shooter but with little ones specially it is easy to get carried away. And with a little one too the time you get to be doing some editing as somehow shrink to no time at all and unprocessed picture accumulate.

After that, personally I just use Lightroom. Edit in, rather than edit out. ie selecting the very best, as opposed to trying to get rid of the less good images, should speed things up.

What do you mean by edit in rather that edit out?

I usually edit only the best and export them but that don't remove the unused picture off my computer. Whats bugs me is not really the culling to find the best but the "delete everything i will never use" because it take gigabites and gigabites. I think i should have a culling step before my editing. I usually edit straight away jut skipping to the next until i find another keeper and forgot to delete the not as good as the previous one. What I find out yesterday too and i didn't know it's that preview are only use in the library module so they don't speed up anything in the develop module, so to zoom in a picture it take maybe 3 seconds. I should try to do all that initial culling and zoom in / zooming out in the library mode.

Faststone Image Viewer is free and very quick for culling - you'll need to enable tagging.
Perfect Browse is also quick though not free. It supports Lightrooms star ratings and colour tagging. It's a bit buggy though, I'm glad I got my copy free as part of a promotion.

I might give Fastone a try, Perfect Brwse seems interresting if it allow lightroom star ratings and colour tagging (at the moment i use none of that maybe i should try it).

I shoot wildlife - birds in flight, dragonflies, deer etc - so I often have multiple copies of the same/similar shot. What I have started doing in auto-stacking by capture time - this will group photos taken within say 1 second (you can vary this) of another. I then collapse these stacks so I only see the photo at the top of the stack. Then for each stack, I view them in grid mode (in a 2x2 grid) and pick the best image to take into develop mode - the rest get flagged for deletion further down the line. The selected image is then put at the top of the stack, the stack collapsed and I move on to the next.

Seems like a really interesting idea to stack by interval between picture and see as a grid each stack, you see a lot of this stuff in lightroom i have never used!

 

[juggler]

What do you mean by edit in rather that edit out?

Also called positive picking. You don't spend time eliminating the ones you don't want to process. Instead develop an eye so you can see at first glance which ones you do want to take further.

 

[rob-nikon]

I import all RAWs into lightroom. I firstly use the pick (P) and reject (X) flags. I use the filter function to only select the picked images (rejects are all deleted later, usually after final processing has been completed). Next I rate all images using star ratings 1-3. 3 stars are edited first, then 2 stars then 1 star. Often the 1 stars are edited at a later date as I find I have enough from the 2 and 3 star rated images. I suppose this is a bit like a negative and positive picking process. I need to be more ruthless with the reject flags as I often leave something that will probably never get off the hard drive.

I personnally don't see a need for using another piece of software as Lightroom can be used for rating and culling using flags and star ratings. If I have a several hundred to go through (usually only after a few days trip away for wildlife) I find the culling and rating stage is great to do on my laptop before moving back to the desktop for the individual processing of the images.Its nice to rate and cull whilst sitting on the sofa.

 

[steveb]

My personal favourite to cull and grade is ON1 Browse. It's commercial, but I believe it's worth it to me. The only downside is it sometimes crashes, no big deal. I use the Mac version, but its also available for Windows.

 

[Jayst84]

What do you mean by edit in rather that edit out?

I usually edit only the best and export them but that don't remove the unused picture off my computer. Whats bugs me is not really the culling to find the best but the "delete everything i will never use" because it take gigabites and gigabites. I think i should have a culling step before my editing. I usually edit straight away jut skipping to the next until i find another keeper and forgot to delete the not as good as the previous one.

As Simon says, just flagging the 'good' shots as you go through, rather than trying to eliminate the poorer shots. Say you have 5 similar shots, you may get rid of 2 that are clearly not so great, and then keep the other 3 and process them all, or umm and ahh between them. The trick is to see the 5 similar shots, decide right away which one is the money shot, flag that one and move on to the next set.

Everyone has their own way of using the myriad tools available, personally now I keep it pretty simple. Flick through in full screen mode, hitting 1 star on the keepers. Go through the whole job like this before going back to the start and processing those that are rated 1 star. When I go back to process I may reject a few more that I thought may be OK at the time - or I may have come across a similar shot from later in the shoot that now means I have an almost duplicate. Once it's all done and exported, filter to show unrated images, select the lot and delete them.

Finally I may use higher star ratings, colours, or collections to pick highlights for different folios, websites, social media use, etc.

ETA I use colours to mark for further editing as well. So images that need combining for panoramas may be flagged red, those that need to go to Photoshop for whatever reason get flagged yellow, etc.

 

[juggler]

I personnally don't see a need for using another piece of software as Lightroom can be used for rating and culling using flags and star ratings. If I have a several hundred to go through (usually only after a few days trip away for wildlife) I find the culling and rating stage is great to do on my laptop before moving back to the desktop for the individual processing of the images.Its nice to rate and cull whilst sitting on the sofa.

On my PC Perfect Browse and FastStone are loads quicker at rendering previews than Lightroom - instant rather than a couple of seconds. It makes a big difference.

I've recently started experimenting with syncing with Lightroom Mobile and using the iPad app to do the flagging. If you're willing to wait for the initial sync it's also way quicker than the PC app - partly because swiping to change image or flag one is so fast.

 

[Oliver Pohlmann]

Quick tip....

Have Caps Lock on when flagging or rating photos in Lightroom as it will automatically move to the next photo for you. Saves a lot of arrow key pressing.

 

[ABTog]

Each batch of photos I import to Lightroom, I go through the whole lot, use 3 star rating for the good shots, 4 stars for outstanding shots (I also use 2 stars for panorama shots that need merging). Then I enable the filters in library mode, tell it to only show 3 stars and higher. It'll then only show the good ones for edting in Develop mode.

I don't overshoot either, so that helps. If I do a 2hr shoot with a family, I wouldn't want to come home with more than 300 raw shot really. From that I'll have about 80 that I'll edit.

I'm not very good at deleting unused RAW files though. It would probably save a huge amount of hard drive space if I did

 

[Lemaildetom]

Thanks for all the tips,
I basically need to introduce culling in my work flow, stop jumping straight to develop mode when i find a picture i like. Plus as said above culling can be done on the laptop on the sofa while editing can be done later when i have more time in hand and can plug in my external screen.
I will try culling, using the cap lock and likely the reject flagging.

 

[Lemaildetom]

I post this just as a post it really. But i'm trying a few things out really what is the more important is to go through all my old picture and take all the rubbish one out!
I have a second 1TB SSD in my laptop which has all my picture ever! At the moment it as 600GB of picture hopefuly i can trim half that down in a few month to go back to something more sensible!

 

[ABTog]

..stop jumping straight to develop mode when i find a picture i like.

This is always the temptation. You've looked at a few of the shots on the camera screen, you get the files on the computer and want to edit those good ones straight away. If you really have to send an image to a client the same day, fair enough, edit. But in reality, it does help to get into the process of culling before being too tempted to process.

I do keep my Lightroom catalogues separate though, which means they load quicker (which on my pretty ancient PC is a good idea) and it means I can pop back and open up my catalogue from my trip to Norway for example and go through it again at with fresh eyes, without disturbing what I'm doing with the latest images.

 

[LBJNBA]

I personally don't tend to use the library much for culling.

I do however take a couple hundred photos where each one needs looked at before deleting.

I import all the images and then go to develop, I press X on the ones I don't like and keep moving like that.

Once I've gone through them all you can go to the menu and press PHOTO> Delete rejected photos. You then get the option to delete from disk or lightroom and if you never want to see it again you delete from disk.

 

[posiview]

I have a very easy rating method: 5 stars or 0 stars.

I make a very fast judgement then delete the 0 starts straight away.

Works for me but might not work for everybody.

Cheers.

 

[LBJNBA]

I have a very easy rating method: 5 stars or 0 stars.

I make a very fast judgement then delete the 0 starts straight away.

Works for me but might not work for everybody.

Cheers.

Certainly doesn't work for me, I can never decide whats a 4 or a 5

I work on a much simpler basis, like - dislike

But whatever works for you is all that matters, its good to have options.

 

[john.margetts]

When I am culling I simply decide if I am ever going to actually bother printing a particular image. If 'no' it gets deleted. 600 GB of images is far too many. If I expect 200 exceptional images each year and 13 years of digital photography - that is a total of 2,600 images to keep. No point in keeping the boring, average images.

 

[Lemaildetom]

When I am culling I simply decide if I am ever going to actually bother printing a particular image. If 'no' it gets deleted. 600 GB of images is far too many. If I expect 200 exceptional images each year and 13 years of digital photography - that is a total of 2,600 images to keep. No point in keeping the boring, average images.

Yes indeed, in fact i move 100GB of video to an external HD to sort out another time. And i'm going through the 500GB slowly, i basically kept all my photo since 2007, all in raw! Only in the last year or so I have became more organised and selective! I think it's worth doing this big clean up.