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
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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).
Sounds like a job for Photo Mechanic https://home.camerabits.com
The full time working pros I know (and I know most in my metro) could not get by without this
This is the correct answer.
Yeah if you’re happy to drop the money this is the answer.
It might be worth getting a trail of one of the new pieces of software that use Ai to sort through images.
I have yet to see an AI tool that can cull photos automatically. But more important, an ML model cannot rate an image, thats personal after all.
It could detect the subject, or group things based on what it thinks it is. But can’t decide if image A or image B is better.
Adobe Bridge, you can order them however you want, by lens, camera, iso, aperture, chronologically, etc etc, and it will retain the ranking you give them (5 stars model). Batch rename them, open them as raw, and a heck of a lot of features I probably don’t know.
Just have a fast computer, depends on how many files are on your folder, but it does take a good chunk of ram.
It’s a hog but it does the job (same is true for most Adobe software).
I honestly find Bridge very useful and easy to use, it baffles me that most photographers don’t try it.
When I did weddings, I had a second shooter, between both of us we would take 6,000+ photos, and bridge would combine them flawlessly in chronological order.
As long as your cameras aren’t set to different time zones… ask me how I know.
But yes overall I agree. I use the hell out of Bridge.
You can edit the capture time in Bridge. It’s in the Edit menu.
Jajajajaja happened a couple of times even a few minutes of difference in a wedding will fuck you up
exiftool will adjust the date/time in the exif data by any number of minutes… to adjust for internal clocks that are slightly off or to adjust for timezone.
Thanks man, I got out of weddings 6 years ago and I’m never going back.
I learned this about a week too late for my latest wedding editing D:
Assuming it’s still around, there is a great piece of software called Fast Picture Viewer that is basically designed for this - it reads RAWS extremely fast and is built for lightning quick reviewing, tagging and ranking etc. I used to live in it when I was working on PCs and took photos for my job.
Very curious about your partner’s job - are they hiring??
They do all the photography and marine biology info for a whale watching company
Very cool!
She has every one of the curated photos she’s taken over the last 6+ years on a hard drive.
I just don’t understand people.
All of their life’s work on a single hard drive. Ready to be lost at any time.
Saying she has double redundancy wasn’t relevant to this post
Don’t do it. Hear me out.
Rating that many images is not going to be enjoyable. Even with the nice tools kindly suggested here. If it was not done in the last 6 years it is not urgent.
Instead, wait a bit more for AI to catch up. In a few years there will be tools to do just that. I guess they will cull 2/3 of the load out of the box, and you will guide it a bit over a few dozen images so it gets you the top 10%. Do that last part yourself, image by image.
A friend of mine uses a game controller mapped to Lightroom to speed things up
I that’s clever actually, wonder if I could map a guitar hero controller or a DDR mat to really apice things up
Adobe Lightroom. It has better organisational features than Bridge or anything else.
I would have two monitors. Star rate, while full screen on the right monitor. Use quick keys. Then do another pass to add to collections, or color code. Whatever suits your workflow.
photo mechanic is your answer. every pro photographer I know uses PM to cull their stuff
You’ve gotten great types on a system to manage the ratings, but I’ll point out that the way you assign them can be important. I like the process where you go through different stages of binary choices, starting out extremely fast and whittling the numbers down eventually going slower with a smaller set. All similar variations: 1 2 3
Others like to go through photos once and choose between 1-5.
This maybe a good use case for Aftershoot.
I use FastStone for culling. Press alt+(1-5) to rate them. Press left/right to move to next photo. In the folder view, you can filter by rating.
If she sold 100-200 curated photos to clients, hasn’t she already done that rating? I presume those are already the 5* images.
No, sold in bulk from the trip, just culled the crap ones.
Darktable has a library management built in. Could help with automatically sortimg your photos by date into labeled folders. From there you can just start working on your backlog amd make sure to tag and maybe rate any new incoming photos in a timely manner so as not to add to that nacklog of work.