what is the best way to review large number of photos

Orangeade

Orangeade

Orangeade

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Silly question, but over the years I've accumulated thousands and thousands of photos. completely and utterly unorganised. I would really like to take a bit of time, find a way to index them into different topics etc.

Is there a best practice for this? Also is there any software that would help? I would prefer to use a desktop so I can use mouse/keyboard, I have quite a few screens so that should not be an issue. But even looking through them now it's a pain as its constantly switching from this to that etc.

Any tips much appreciated! I think there is maybe 10,000+ pictures. I reckon around 1/3 I will delete at least.
 
Lightroom Classic, you can use smart projects to organise based on date etc. and then keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through the images and rate them.

Can’t think of a smarter way of doing it, Raymond might be able to help here.
 
Okay, I am importing them. Unfortunately it is picking up all on my storage SSD so I guess I need a way to refine. Currently over 75,000 images being imported... currently using 54gb of ram?! Seems excessive!
 
Orangeade said:
Okay, I am importing them. Unfortunately it is picking up all on my storage SSD so I guess I need a way to refine. Currently over 75,000 images being imported... currently using 54gb of ram?! Seems excessive!
Click to expand...

Photo editing is a RAM intensive task. I've had 32G of ram in my iMac from as far back as 2012.

The way to refine them is to put all your photos under 1 folder, and then "tree" them, into folders.

Point the import to the root of that folder, not the entire drive.
 
Last edited:
Raymond Lin said:
Photo editing is a RAM intensive task. I've had 32G of ram in my iMac from as far back as 2012.

The way to refine them is to put all your photos under 1 folder, and then "tree" them, into folders.

Point the import to the root of that folder, not the entire drive.
Click to expand...


Thanks for that. Do you know if it's possible to set filtering and actual file movement within Lightroom itself? I have a ton of internet screenshots, random **** etc, gifs, videos of random stuff that is also clogging this all up. I would prefer to find someway of doing the following:

1) Move all photos and videos that were taken by me and put them on my SSD in one folder.
2) Move all internet photos and videos into another folder.

and then for the 1st one basically have a reel of them which I can basically scroll through super fast (I am not sure if it exists but if there was a way to automatically cut out or group "similar" photos I guess that would help) and basically select keep (stays in folder), archive (basically old stuff I don't think I need so put into a new folder) and delete for stuff I know I definitely don't want. (This process will also help me to remove old photos from the past I don't want to remember etc rather than keep carrying them around with me!

I searched on Youtube and some guy talks a lot of about doing by dates etc, but not by "initial sort" so not sure if its even possible?
 
I import/ copy my images onto the pc and save them in a folder format named:

YYYY MM DD - summary title

And all those folder sit in a top “Pictures” folder on the drive.

Then from there will import it into LR or what ever.

If I’m backing up the phones, then I copy all the images into a single temp folder, sort by date and then move them out into quarterly folders

YYYY MM 01 - Various

Where MM would be 03, 06, 09, 12 .

This structure dates back dates to 2006 now in my machine and has served to light room in Mac’s, pcs and latterly just in general.

Thats only part of the issue.. next step is culling the crap ones. For that, I would open the folder and preview each I turn.

In LR that’s easy …

In a folder just preview the in turn going through with the arrow keys. If crap, press 1 to give it 1 star if you like it press 3 to give it 3 stars and move on.

Then once done, filter the view to view anything that equals 1 … (not 1 or greater, just equals). Once they show, select them and delete them. Youre now left with the ones you like.

By selecting 1, you’re specifying you don’t like it. If you left inun-starred and deleted the ones with no stars you might have skipped over and miss some good one, and ended up deleting them accidentally.
 
Orangeade said:
Thanks for that. Do you know if it's possible to set filtering and actual file movement within Lightroom itself? I have a ton of internet screenshots, random **** etc, gifs, videos of random stuff that is also clogging this all up. I would prefer to find someway of doing the following:

1) Move all photos and videos that were taken by me and put them on my SSD in one folder.
2) Move all internet photos and videos into another folder.

and then for the 1st one basically have a reel of them which I can basically scroll through super fast (I am not sure if it exists but if there was a way to automatically cut out or group "similar" photos I guess that would help) and basically select keep (stays in folder), archive (basically old stuff I don't think I need so put into a new folder) and delete for stuff I know I definitely don't want. (This process will also help me to remove old photos from the past I don't want to remember etc rather than keep carrying them around with me!

I searched on Youtube and some guy talks a lot of about doing by dates etc, but not by "initial sort" so not sure if its even possible?
Click to expand...

Honestly, I don't know how you are going (or LR is) going to sort it if it isn't taken from a camera, with metadata.

If you have LR opened and then plug in a memory card with photos taken, then LR will puil the photos from the memory card and sort them in date order and put them into your SSD of your choosing in date order for you.

That's how I have always done it and do it. The file structure within LR then reflects the folder structure in the SSD.
 
Donnie Fisher said:
I import/ copy my images onto the pc and save them in a folder format named:

YYYY MM DD - summary title

And all those folder sit in a top “Pictures” folder on the drive.

Then from there will import it into LR or what ever.

If I’m backing up the phones, then I copy all the images into a single temp folder, sort by date and then move them out into quarterly folders

YYYY MM 01 - Various

Where MM would be 03, 06, 09, 12 .

This structure dates back dates to 2006 now in my machine and has served to light room in Mac’s, pcs and latterly just in general.

Thats only part of the issue.. next step is culling the crap ones. For that, I would open the folder and preview each I turn.

In LR that’s easy …

In a folder just preview the in turn going through with the arrow keys. If crap, press 1 to give it 1 star if you like it press 3 to give it 3 stars and move on.

Then once done, filter the view to view anything that equals 1 … (not 1 or greater, just equals). Once they show, select them and delete them. Youre now left with the ones you like.

By selecting 1, you’re specifying you don’t like it. If you left inun-starred and deleted the ones with no stars you might have skipped over and miss some good one, and ended up deleting them accidentally.
Click to expand...

Interesting I didn't know you could rate them, that sounds good. I mean there is a lot of images but I guess this is what I pay for years of neglect. I expect at the end of this only to have maybe 1000 photos or so that I actually want.

So looks like I do need to do some work in windows first to collate them...
 
Raymond Lin said:
Honestly, I don't know how you are going (or LR is) going to sort it if it isn't taken from a camera, with metadata.

If you have LR opened and then plug in a memory card with photos taken, then LR will puil the photos from the memory card and sort them in date order and put them into your SSD of your choosing in date order for you.

That's how I have always done it and do it. The file structure within LR then reflects the folder structure in the SSD.
Click to expand...

Good point.....I have like 50 folders within folders of stuff I've pulled from my phones, cameras etc over the years so it's about as disorganised as disorganised can be. I guess most photos would have metadata so I might try and filter with photos with any meta data first that might take a good chunk of them.
 
Yes, you can do that within the windows explorer in the details view, and adding the date taken column to the window to bring that out to sort.

Failing that, I suppose it’ll be date created as a starter. I’d start by organising years first into folders, then breaking each of those down into months, then if you needed, into more granular folders.
 
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