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Archive 2015 · Overwhelmed by the backlog

  
 
johnvanr
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


Ignoring for now the thousands of slides and negatives of those early times, I have tens of thousands of files lingering in Lightroom. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Ever since I started bird photography it has become worse, since the shooting rate has gone up exponentially and I shoot much faster than I cull my shots once back home.

I've been bad in the past in narrowing down my choice images, so it's one big jumble of rejects, so-so, good and great, with only a few that actually have been processed all the way (I do process the images I post on my blog, but that's about it).

Whenever I think about tackling this, I'm all over the place: one day I start with the images now years old, the other day I start with the newer ones. And that's just rating them, not actually processing them. It's not fun and it doesn't result in any satisfaction because it's just a drop in the bucket.

For those who have successfully dealt with this, what worked for you in terms of going through tens of thousands of images and narrowing them down to a portfolio in prints/files that you are happy with?



Dec 12, 2015 at 11:57 AM
BluesWest
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


it's one big jumble of rejects, so-so, good and great...

The answer is simple: keep the great ones and delete everything else.

John



Dec 12, 2015 at 12:52 PM
johnvanr
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


BluesWest wrote:
The answer is simple: keep the great ones and delete everything else.

John


That never works for me. I'm a digital hoarder. Plus, if I only kept the great ones, with my definition of 'great' I'd have very few left. I tend to be dissatisfied with most of what I produce.

(I know that sounds depressive, but I see it as a great incentive to keep on going and get better).



Dec 12, 2015 at 01:07 PM
Peter Figen
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


Maybe you should start by defining what your final goal for these images are. Are they just for you or are you going to try and market them somehow. Then, just start working on the ones that jump out at you and pretty soon you'll build up a catalog of heroes and the rejects will take care of themselves. You don't have to delete anything other than the ones that are obviously unusable but start out working on only the images that are standouts. Over time you may find that images you didn't recognize at the time are actually better than you thought and you'll discover those when going back and perusing your catalog. I've done pretty much the same thing with scanning forty years of film over the last fifteen years. If I tackled the whole thing at once, I'd never of started, but take a little here and there and before you know it you're somewhere.


Dec 12, 2015 at 01:20 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


johnvanr wrote:
That never works for me. I'm a digital hoarder. Plus, if I only kept the great ones, with my definition of 'great' I'd have very few left. I tend to be dissatisfied with most of what I produce.

(I know that sounds depressive, but I see it as a great incentive to keep on going and get better).


you can be a digital hoarder and be better at keeping only the good ones .

it does take some disipline (and Im probably not a good one to preach ) but keeping all of your stuff just adds 'white noise' to your library stopping your getting to the good stuff.

2 ways you can hoard and cut the chaff :

1: work in collections rather than folders . you can have you folder structure as normal and can hoard as much as you like but only have 'picks' in the collection . theres no reason why you can't have a collection structure that matches your folder structure . create a smart collection that matches the a folder that can contain only stuff thats in that folder . and then add the rule that only allow Pic flagged images in that collection .

2: use a 2nd hard drive that contains the rejects and not so good images . sort of like deleting the images but still keeping them .
bets way to do this i find is to do a 2 pass cull .
1st pass is immediate rejections . no going to 100% view just flag as pick or reject . don't take much time at all on any 1 image . you can do this cull pretty quick . all rejects can then be moved to the other hard drive .

2nd cull . slower cull that can be more critical . use 100% view etc . again any rejects can be moved to the other hard drive .

whats left should be the 'good' stuff . you can then set yourself a goal for this images . i.e. pick best 10 etc .
nothing gets deleted so you can pacify the hoarder in you


I tend to do a mix the 2 methods . and will periodically go thru the reject drive and delete the files . but in the mean time it sits there and is not part of my backup strategy so i don't have to spend more £££ on larger drives to backup stuff thats not worth keeping . I take the view that if it dies it just saves me going thru and deleting stuff . nothing is going to be THAT missed .

of course family stuff is treated a bit better as even some of the rejects could have meaning a bit further down the line . (that has happened to me once with an image of my grandmother that turned out to be the last image of her taken . even though its not great and has an obstruction in the frame it is precious )



Dec 12, 2015 at 02:02 PM
chez
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


johnvanr wrote:
That never works for me. I'm a digital hoarder. Plus, if I only kept the great ones, with my definition of 'great' I'd have very few left. I tend to be dissatisfied with most of what I produce.

(I know that sounds depressive, but I see it as a great incentive to keep on going and get better).


If you are dissatisfied with the majority...why keep them around. Trash can they go. My number 1 rule is before I let anyone else see one of my photos, I need to be satisfied with the photo. If I'm not happy with an image, it's gone.



Dec 12, 2015 at 02:20 PM
Jeffrey
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


Editing and DELETING gobs of useless and nearly duplicate image files is a skill you need to master. It's OK to let go.


Dec 12, 2015 at 02:57 PM
ohsnaphappy
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


Hard drives are cheap. Organize files by year, put each year on a hard drive. Put the hard drives in the attic.

I'd also make a catalogue for each year. Or month. Depending on how much you shoot. Keep a master catalogue with the good stuff.

Good luck! Honestly sounds like a fun problem! And at least you're taking pictures. Lots of folks have gear but never use it.



Dec 12, 2015 at 06:29 PM
BluesWest
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


if I only kept the great ones, with my definition of 'great' I'd have very few left.

Yes, that's the point. Storage problem solved. And you will on your way to becoming a better photographer.

John



Dec 12, 2015 at 11:50 PM
ggreene
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


I am usually behind in processing photos as well. Love taking them but processing them can be a lot of work, especially if you are doing action photography where you're almost always taking 3-5 shots per moment to capture that peak image.

I've learned to be pretty aggressive. Technical rejects are fairly easy and clearcut but composition rejects can really slow you down. Setting up some rules for what needs to be in the photo can help in making culling a more efficient process. For sports, I want a face with eyes open, some kind of action/movement, and the ball or puck in the frame if applicable. If it doesn't have those I'm usually deleting the photo unless I know it's a player that Media Relations wants photos of then I'll keep some that break the rules.

Another thing that helps with culling is finding a fast viewer with a quick one button delete. DPP on the Mac seems to be the best of the ones I tried. On Windows you have the ultimate as BBPro is the best culling software I have ever used. I've definitely thought of getting VMWare Fusion just for that alone.



Dec 13, 2015 at 08:53 AM
schlotz
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


It comes down to realizing you cannot use the 'hoarder' label as an excuse for not doing the obvious, whether it's out of procrastination or what ever. There is no silver bullet / quick solution. Now the obvious statement here to one that's in a hole, is to stop digging A bit more constructive: try to establish a work flow that culls out the OOFs etc using a 3rd party app first. Personally, I use PhotoMechanic. Then go back, mark potentials and only import those. When in LR if you are dissatisfied with any you've imported do a delete from disk not just from LR.

BTW: when I mark potentials I also move then to a subfolder usually called 'picks'.



Dec 13, 2015 at 09:37 AM
nolaguy
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


schlotz wrote:
Now the obvious statement here to one that's in a hole, is to stop digging


Matt. Please stop making sense. It's very annoying to those of us who don't.




Dec 13, 2015 at 04:35 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


I've 20k images in my backlog. Thank god i'm not doing this professionally...


Dec 13, 2015 at 04:47 PM
Paul Mo
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


I recently culled 15000+ images down to (trying to remember) about 1400 keepers - housecleaning, love it.

Find the time, open a nice interview on YouTube and sit there, concentrating and culling.

It is tough but worth it.



Dec 14, 2015 at 12:28 AM
johnvanr
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


We're talking about 120,000 images in one catalog and about 10,000 in another. And that's after I used PhotoMechanic to cull the initial load of bird images.

For a while I used to post to a photo blog and would just scour my hard drive for a good image, but that's years ago. Now, it's hard to find anything.

Part of this is the amount of shooting I've done in the past few years just to review cameras and lenses and much of that is visually unattractive and highly repetitive. And part of the enormous increase in the past year is shooting birds with the 1D X. Since I'm still learning to work with birds and long lenses, I kept many bad shots around to study them in DPP and see where I went wrong with focusing/tracking. As I gain experience, that cull gets easier.

Thanks for the tips. Guess I just have to start somewhere.

I did make three types of smart collections: personal, birds and the rest. Within those I have three to five stars, so a color and star combo will set priority for what to focus on in terms of post processing after the editing. I have a separate catalog for model photography (didn't want the kids to stumble upon model shots when they were still little), which will need different treatment.



Dec 14, 2015 at 08:30 AM
BenV
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


As others have said, its just something that needs to be done. I ask myself "what am I really ever going to do with these photos." Luckily I don't add up photos quite as much as others. I don't do much action, so burst isn't used. If I really want to keep them for whatever reason, I batch convert them to jpeg and dump em on a CD and forget about it.


Dec 14, 2015 at 02:04 PM
Frogfish
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


The problem with bird photography - as ONLY bird togs will understand - is that you end up with up to 100 or more *very* similar shots of a bird in a *very* similar pose and you often need to look at them at 100% to find out which ones are critically focused

The best way to do this is to be hyper-crtical of the pose (assuming you have a LOT of shots of that one type of bird, which can amount to hundreds of a similar shots of a certain species on a productive day) and just keep the 2 or 3 favourite poses.

Of course you then also keep all of the shots of particular type of bird because it is rare or beautiful !



Dec 14, 2015 at 02:04 PM
ShepherdLady
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


johnvanr wrote:
That never works for me. I'm a digital hoarder. Plus, if I only kept the great ones, with my definition of 'great' I'd have very few left. I tend to be dissatisfied with most of what I produce.

(I know that sounds depressive, but I see it as a great incentive to keep on going and get better).


Storage is cheap. Keep them. I'm in the same boat. It's hard for me to delete most. If they're out of focus, I will delete.
But it's a drop in the bucket.
So buy another hard drive...

Toni




Dec 14, 2015 at 04:47 PM
johnvanr
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


ShepherdLady wrote:
Storage is cheap. Keep them. I'm in the same boat. It's hard for me to delete most. If they're out of focus, I will delete.
But it's a drop in the bucket.
So buy another hard drive...

Toni



It's not so much about keeping them, it's about finding the good ones in between all the mediocre or bad ones. Currently I do too much wading through thousands of files to get to something I remember I shot and liked.



Dec 14, 2015 at 05:45 PM
nolaguy
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · Overwhelmed by the backlog


The fear of regret can become a ball and chain and completely screw up our ability to enjoy today and tomorrow. Delete with abandon. Or just ignore the pile. Spend more time on new and exciting things to come.




Dec 14, 2015 at 09:46 PM
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