With this article I’d like to share my workflow for screening large batches of photos.
Recently, I returned from an incredible hiking trip on Iceland with over 1000 photos. Of course, not all of those photos were worth keeping. Whenever I have to screen a large number of photos, I perform the following steps:
- In the “grid” view I enable filtering by attribute and metadata. To reduce the amount of photos, I usually filter by date taken. This helps focusing on certain events or situations in which the photos were taken. The attribute filter is the actual clue: I show only “picked” and “non-flagged” photos, but not “rejected” photos. This way I can use the “x” key to hide photos from this view.
- Then I switch to “compare” view, I can compare two photos very comfortably. Each of the photos shown has controls to manipulate the flag or selection status of the photo. A photo I don’t want to keep, I will flag as rejected, while a photo I like to keep will be just deselected (with the “x” button on the lower right corner of the photo). For rejecting a photo, you can use the “x” key as a shortcut. Rejecting a photo will hide it in this view (remember the filter settings above) while deselecting a photo will keep it in the view but jump to the next photo in the compare view.
- In addition to the normal compare view, I use the photo information overlay (use the “i” key to toggle information overlay) in order to judge by the settings of the photo which might be the preferred one. In 100% zoom view I can easily spot blurred photos. The only drawback with the compare view is, that there is no way to show blown highlights or black shadows directly.
With this technique, you can easily skip through a large stack of photos, sorting out the ones you don’t want to keep. In my example I got rid of about 2/3 of the photos very quickly.
- The next step requires a bit more patience. Here I step through the photos once again, but this time I give the photos a rating, where 1 star means “poor” and 5 stars means “exceptional”. The normal rating of my photos is between 3 and 4 stars. After the rating, you can take a closer look at the 1-2 star photos, whether they are still needed or not.
- Now with the rating applied, I usually focus only on photos with more than 3 stars. These photos are properly tagged with keywords and additional information.
- After adding metadata, I start editing photos in the develop module. This is necessary, as I try to expose for highlights in my landscape photos. That means that I try to not overexpose highlights to retain as much detail as possible. This way the sky remains nicely structured with types different clouds.