I'm drowning in photos

[lykaon78]

I have in excess of 36,000 photos taking up 179GB of space. I'd like to narrow that down to something more manageable.

What strategies do you use to quickly filter out throw-aways and identify the shots you want to keep?

What software do you use for this (is there something specifically for this)?

I'm just a hobbyist with a daughter who I find especially photogenic and a penchant for garden photos.

I have PS Elements 12 if that is helpful.

Any strategies to help me clean up my collection would be appreciated.

 

[Berliner]

You can use Photomechanic or Lightroom to rate, label and sort things.

I don't think PS Elements has Bridge, which has similar functionality?

If you want something free, try FastStone Image Viewer to cull bad photos.

 

[Fenixgoon]

i was able to take 4000 photos down to 1500 in a few hours. i just went in windows preview and just kept pressing delete

 

[Imp]

I'm paranoid about drive space so I usually delete most of my stuff -- habit from back in the day. However, most photos I take, I do for my website, which I keep lean by lowering the photo and file size of all pictures... However, I usually only choose the best 5-ish of a batch and delete the rest right after I download everything to my desktop.

To go through 5000 photos? I'd just start mashing delete for anything that looked like a duplicate, dud, or boring.

 

[NAC]

That's all?

I've got just over 100k photos taking up 830 gigs of space. However, that also includes video - likely a substantial amount of the space but relatively few files. Just this past weekend I took just over 1.5k photos - mostly at a soccer game.

I do want to get better at reviewing pictures, deleting the truly unusable ones, and flagging the better photos. I don't mind keeping most photos though - I have no desire to seriously cull my photos.

Unfortunately I have no suggestions other than start soon, and be diligent. So be the opposite of me in this regard...

 

[lykaon78]

I just bought a new computer. So I figure it's time for a major cull of my photos.

But a part of me likes your (NAC) approach to picture storage. After all, in the TB world we now operate in what is 200 GB?

 

[Smoove910]

179gb in space? Wow... I guess when I deal with TB's of photos and single RAW images that are 40mb each, 179 gb isn't much.

 

[CuriousMike]

One option might be to have a backup drive with ALL the photos on it.
Then set it aside.
Then, on your main drive, just cull the hell out of your photos so your primary machine is "light and lean."

 

[blastingcap]

250GB here, and that's WITH culling. On a 8+ TB NAS (mirrored so I actually have over 16GB of HDDs).

My recommendation is to get a big fat NAS or build one (FreeNAS or NAS4Free).

 

[mauiblue]

I was using Picasa at one point a couple years ago and was able to get through a thousand of junk photos. I have about 25,000 photos to go through. Now I'm using Lightroom. I'm not making the time to really make a dent on reducing the junk photos. That's my problem. It takes patience and focus to sit there and go through each photo. I also need to get more familiar with Lightroom (I just got it a couple months ago). Eventually I'll get through them all and I won't make the same mistake of letting all my photos pile up in a big mess it is now.

 

[mikeymikec]

I re-save my digital camera photos through a batch operation in XnView. My Canon PowerShot A640 typically produces a JPEG of about 5MB. After re-saving (and I've checked a number of times to see whether I could see any differences, zooming in and comparing portions of images, etc), the file size typically drops just below 1MB.

 

[pontifex]

damn, and i thought 14.2 gb was a lot on my system, haha.

i usually cull them when i upload. so i upload, then look through them and delete the ones that are bad or i don't like. even then, i still have some that could probably get deleted.

 

[Syborg1211]

A program with a rating system makes things pretty simple. I only have experience with Lightroom so I'll discuss how it works with LR. You scroll through your photos and they are by default a rating 0. You can rate them easily from 0-5 by just pretty the corresponding number on the keyboard while you are viewing the photos in library mode. You also have the option of pretty X on the keyboard and it will make that photo as rejected (you can change the rating any time by pretty 0-5 again).

At the end of your pass through, you can just click a button in the menus that says Remove all rejected photos or something along those lines, and it will ask if you want to delete them from the disk.

 

[shortylickens]

I use ACDSee to organize. Its very nice and I recommend it.


As for decision making, thats up to you. If you know your old crummy 640x480 shots arent worth keeping, you could just organize by dimension and then delete them.


Right off the bat, if you shoot in RAW, its time to decide whether you really need to keep them. You dont need RAW for archiving, just editing. If you dont plan to edit, then convert and delete the RAW files. I just dumped about 200 and it saved me loads of hard drive.

 

[pontifex]

I use ACDSee to organize. Its very nice and I recommend it.


As for decision making, thats up to you. If you know your old crummy 640x480 shots arent worth keeping, you could just organize by dimension and then delete them.


Right off the bat, if you shoot in RAW, its time to decide whether you really need to keep them. You dont need RAW for archiving, just editing. If you dont plan to edit, then convert and delete the RAW files. I just dumped about 200 and it saved me loads of hard drive.

damn! i remember using acdsee back in like late 90s, lol.

been using irfanview for my photos. thats probably been around a while as well.

 

[bigi]

faststone image viewer. You're welcome

 

[Scarpozzi]

Because all of mine are family photos, I recently did this. I took all of my photos and ordered them chronologically by year. I created a directory structure of 2000,2001,2002,2003....2012,2013,2014...then within each of those, I split them up by season or month. If there were trips or presorted groups, I elected to keep those together. That allowed me to sort pictures base don relevance, etc...because I knew when they were. The ones that were from certain events/trips could be rated higher.

Once you split them up, it's far easier to go through them. You could spend a few days deleting the oldest pictures you know you don't care about and tackle it in phases. So....sort first, then cull.

 

[imported_Irse]

I use Downloader Pro to rename file. I use just the date and original file name. Then use ACDSee to put keywords and organize them. I get rid of photos when I upload them so I don't waste my time with a lot of unuseable pics.

 

[sm625]

I just recently went through a few thousand photos, and one thing I noticed was that when I converted 3-8MB jpgs down to around 400KB, the quality was surprisingly good. They could be archived at that size. Find a good batch converter and get it set up the way you want and you can shrink them down to the point where you wont need to cull anything.

 

[CuriousMike]

All this talk about nuking your RAWS for the JPG exports or downsizing photos to save disk space isn't something I'd consider... disk space is too cheap.

What if better RAW processing software comes out in a few years?
What if that downsized JPG is a super memorable photo in 10 years that you want to poster print ?

If I was 16 years old and had no money, I could see doing the juggling act.

As an adult, it seems way too cheap to simply purchase a < $100 terabyte (!) of disk space and archive everything off that way. Sure, cull the bad stuff first, but don't skimp out on quality because you can't backup.

 

[ElFenix]

CCleaner now has a duplicate file finder, so it should help cull duplicates (obviously, don't select both your main photo folder(s) and your backup at the same time).

 

[notposting]

I have no idea what I have for photos, but agree with the idea of keeping basically a separate "archive" of EVERYTHiING around.

And then the sorted, edited, cropped, etc, stuff is all in it's own directory on the server.

 

[blastingcap]

All this talk about nuking your RAWS for the JPG exports or downsizing photos to save disk space isn't something I'd consider... disk space is too cheap.

What if better RAW processing software comes out in a few years?
What if that downsized JPG is a super memorable photo in 10 years that you want to poster print ?

If I was 16 years old and had no money, I could see doing the juggling act.

As an adult, it seems way too cheap to simply purchase a < $100 terabyte (!) of disk space and archive everything off that way. Sure, cull the bad stuff first, but don't skimp out on quality because you can't backup.

I agree with the above. Disk space is only getting cheaper.

 

[tdawg]

I use Lightroom and "flag as rejected" the files I know are bad or that I will never use during the first pass through my new import. Then just hit command+delete and these rejects are deleted from my Lightroom catalog and my hdd. Even doing this I'm at 0GB of RAW and converted JPGs.

 

[Syborg1211]

All this talk about nuking your RAWS for the JPG exports or downsizing photos to save disk space isn't something I'd consider... disk space is too cheap.

What if better RAW processing software comes out in a few years?
What if that downsized JPG is a super memorable photo in 10 years that you want to poster print ?

If I was 16 years old and had no money, I could see doing the juggling act.

As an adult, it seems way too cheap to simply purchase a < $100 terabyte (!) of disk space and archive everything off that way. Sure, cull the bad stuff first, but don't skimp out on quality because you can't backup.

Yup! I actually every year buy two external drives and label them Photos 2014, and they are double backups of my photos for that year. I know people who go so far as to keep a safety deposit box to keep one of these double backups out of their house. This is a good move if I had kids and their photos were that invaluable to me. External drives are cheap as dirt these days.