When you’re dealing with the results of a photo session, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of files. I was initially very slow at culling, and struggled to find the photos I wanted to post. I gradually learned the importance of having a good process, and on my last go I managed to go through nearly 7,000 pictures in 2 days.
The overall idea is to start with very simple decisions, with multiple filtering rounds reducing the amount of pictures to consider, and at the same time slowly increasing how much time you spend on each picture per round.
I use Lightroom’s flag and star ratings for this, but you can adapt the process to whatever tools your editing software provides.
Here are the different steps of this process I’ve come to use.
Step 0 : Organization
If you have a truly huge amount of pictures, try to divide them into sub folders: for instance one for each day, or for each part of the day. This will help for the incoming rounds of filtering, so that you can have smaller cycles of work, and see some results faster.
Before filtering anything, I’ll start by applying auto settings to the RAW files so that I can judge their full potential instead of only seeing pictures that might be badly exposed.
Step 1 : Keeping the interesting ones
Once that’s done, we’ll begin filtering with a simple exercise: “is it an interesting picture?”
If it is, just apply a “pick” flag. Doesn’t have to be using any other metric than if it seems interesting to you, and it doesn’t have to be the best of the bulk. Trust your instincts: it should be relatively simple to sift through all the pictures with a binary “yes or no” question, and this shouldn’t take more than a few seconds per shot. Don’t hesitate to flag pictures that seem similar, they just need to be interesting.
Refrain from actually making changes to pictures at this stage, otherwise this will take a very long time, and it needs to be a rapid fire round.
Step 2 : Removing the unusable
For the next step, another simple choice: “is the picture’s subject in focus?”
That’s it. Put a rejected flag to any picture that isn’t satisfactory. This includes accidental pictures, pictures where the flash hasn’t fired, your hand partially covering the lens, etc… You still hold off on any editing, this should be a fast round. Hopefully with that step you’ll have shed all unusable pictures.
Step 3 : Iterating
Now we’re going to go through the comparative stage: let’s apply a single star to every picture that seems above the rest.
If you have few pictures: no need to award that star to the best of the best, it just needs to be better than just “interesting”. You can go backwards and forward again to compare the pictures together.
If you have a lot of pictures however, try to compare by pair: first two pictures together, then the next two, etc… This hugely simplifies your mental load as you always only have two images to compare at a time.
And you can repeat this process once again, let’s filter out pictures that have below one star and start awarding 2 stars, then 3, then 4. Each time, the pictures should be at least a little better than the rest.
You can also start editing a bit to see what can be done.
During this process you might find yourself blocked on a couple of pictures that are similar and can’t decide which one to pick. At this point, if you can’t really tell the difference, you might as well pick one based on instinct or at random, the point is to move fast.
Following this step multiple times, you’ll have narrowed down your pictures from, let’s say, a thousand down to a manageable few dozen.
Step 4 : The final choices
And once the 4 stars have been applied, you get to the final round. Since you should have much much less pictures, feel free to edit each remaining picture to your heart’s content to try to get the most out of each of them. The end game: each picture you award 5 stars is one you can publish, one that you would be comfortable having your name attached to. To me this is a gut feeling, I just might not feel like a picture is worthy of publication, a matter of being proud of it or not, but you should apply your own standards here.
Try this method next time you have a lot of pictures to sift through, it may help you! And feel free to change it to your liking to fit your way of working.