My partner works in an industry where part of her job is taking wildlife photos for customers, 1-2K shots per trip get curated down to 100-200 and sold to the customer for a small fee, sometimes free. She has rights to the photos and She has every one of the curated photos she’s taken over the last 6+ years on a hard drive.
All 209,000 of them.
I realize this is going to be a pain in the ass but I’m wondering what system there would be for ranking them to make them easier to find the good stuff later on. Like being able to rank 1-5 stars and searching later on for only 5 star photos, whatever. (This is a feature in windows metadata, but it seems clunky as I currently know how to change it, open to suggestions)
She wont have to go though all of them and can do some grouping based on thumbnails.
Wondering if anyone has a creative solutions
In Lightroom, learn the shortcuts for ranking. You can set it up so you can hit one key to set the rank and then it goes to the next photo.
What I do to accelerate decision making: set filter to 0 stars only. Then either rank as 1 or x. Then filter for 1 star. Then rank as 2 or skip.
In 5 passes you only have 5 star images.
I believe you can also do this for tagging as you go.
Do you know if this applies those ranks to the metadata? I’m noticing that image properties in windows have 1-5 star ratings and options for tags in addition to all the normal EXIF camera stuff. Would be nice to know the rankings weren’t contained in just lightroom in case we ever wanted to switch systems
You can do this - I think you can set it up automatically in settings but if not then you can just select all photos and there’s a setting somewhere called something like ‘save metadata to files’. The automatic setting will be called something like ‘automatically save xmp changes’
Lightroom will also read star ratings, so if you rank them in windows and then import them it will know that you’ve previously ranked them (I expect there are some exceptions).