this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Photography

1 readers
1 users here now

A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
 

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

top 26 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 22alive@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Using prefix and suffix code letter and numbers is the best system I've seen for file explorer. Letters designating the kind of photo or whatever, P- portraiture, pan -panorama etc. Searching with wild card, letter parameter and year to month to will find anything. I most often have file, date, size dimension, edit code with some creative names as prefixes keeping digital names for searching at a later date.

[–] csl512@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A friend of mine uses a game controller mapped to Lightroom to speed things up

[–] 223specialist@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I that's clever actually, wonder if I could map a guitar hero controller or a DDR mat to really apice things up

[–] elonsbattery@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Junin-Toiro@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] wickeddimension@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If she sold 100-200 curated photos to clients, hasn't she already done that rating? I presume those are already the 5* images.

[–] 223specialist@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

No, sold in bulk from the trip, just culled the crap ones.

[–] L0gi@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] midtierrunner@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

photo mechanic is your answer. every pro photographer I know uses PM to cull their stuff

[–] Eruditass@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] crashtesterzoe@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

This maybe a good use case for Aftershoot.

[–] raffyJohnson@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] qtx@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 223specialist@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Saying she has double redundancy wasn't relevant to this post

[–] mofozd@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] possiblyraspberries@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It’s a hog but it does the job (same is true for most Adobe software).

[–] mofozd@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] possiblyraspberries@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Teams11b@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

You can edit the capture time in Bridge. It’s in the Edit menu.

[–] mofozd@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Jajajajaja happened a couple of times even a few minutes of difference in a wedding will fuck you up

[–] bobd60067@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] NineInchNips@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I learned this about a week too late for my latest wedding editing D:

[–] sbxcr@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] f_14@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

This is the correct answer.

[–] ISAMU13@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It might be worth getting a trail of one of the new pieces of software that use Ai to sort through images.

[–] wickeddimension@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.