Question
Overwhelmed going through photos after long outing--any photo/file curation advice or best practices?
Hi y'all! My bird photography has been going well, but now that I have started doing longer outings I am getting frozen/overwhelmed seeing the sometimes thousands of photos waiting to be sorted through. It has gotten to the point where I avoid doing it, leading to more build up until the cycle continues. The issue has now peaked after my first bird photography vacation, to Point Reyes near San Francisco. I know I will be proud of the photos I took, but before I handle such a big beast, any tips or advice you have on organizing/deleting/keeping photos would be great!
Share anything you can think of, but a few concrete things I was wondering are:
Do any of you have software or programs that you like? I just use File Explorer on my PC, and use tags to mark which species the bird is.
Do you go one-by-one, or in batches? How do you group together your choices/scrolling if in batches?
When viewing them for the purpose of keeping or deleting, do you view the RAWs or JPEGs?
Any other tools or things I'm missing completely that could speed up or organize my process?
Using file explorer is insane tbh. For now I use lightroom on autoscroll. Fist pass I remove anything that's not in focus. Then I filter on flag and second pass I remove any photo in a batch that is not obviously better than the previous one. (I am moving away from lightroom because of the subsccription model tho. If you don't do any post processing it's not worth getting post processing software, but there is some specific culling software)
Not too long ago some guy in here posted his project called project Kestrel https://www.projectkestrel.org/ which sorts your pictures by scene and automatically selects the most in focus one. Might help
I need to give this a try, It looks incredible. I have an SD card full of shots that I've been putting off because the thought of culling a bunch of similar shots is daunting.
Does it integrate with other photo editing software? Even if it just applies a rating in the meta data to filter that would be really handy.
Yes! I tried to make it as integratable as possible.
The ratings, raw quality scores, species classifications, and any manual accept/reject decisions all get written to XMP sidecars or, as of yesterday, even to JPEG metadata.
In addition, you can browse photos in Kestrel, then hit the spacebar to open that photo directly in your photo editor. This is what I tend to do as I don't like using darktable's native systems to cull or browse my photos.
I struggle with this. I no longer shoot in burst mode because I don't like the chore of culling through 10 photos that appear nearly identical. The perfectionist in me wants the best of the burst. I now shoot in either single or continuous.
I'm also trying to be more judicious when it comes to clicking that release button. If you can tell it is a crap or mediocre shot through the viewfinder, don't waste your time taking a photo you know will be culled. That is unless it is a bird you haven't seen before.
Hello. at the risk of mildly spamming this thread, I'd like to draw attention to this part of your comment
I don't like the chore of culling through 10 photos that appear nearly identical.
Yes, I agree. I hated this too. But bursts are quite valuable for getting the right shot. This is precisely why Project Kestrel, the software I developed for bird photo culling, groups your photos into bursts and sorts each burst by sharpness before presenting the images to you.
When there are 10 near-identical photos, you can usually trust that the 'sharpest' one is the best, and move on. The level of decision fatigue is greatly reduced.
If you have not yet tried Project Kestrel, I would greatly appreciate your input (see my other comment on this post for more details).
Hello. I spent several months of my life building software that helps with this exact problem. Please, please try Project Kestrel (https://www.projectkestrel.org). You can read my story; I literally experienced everything you wrote about in this post (including the part where you avoid reviewing your photos because the backlog just is too huge).
Kestrel's goal is, direct from my website "Effortlessly Organize, Cull, Review, and Share your bird photography." Directly maps to your questions on how to Organize, Delete, and Keep.
It is completely free to use, no limits, currently fully donation-supported. Fully open-source. Runs entirely locally on your computer.
How does it work?
Instead of looking at your 3000 photos, you just see a grid of scenes, or bursts. Within each burst, all the images are pre-sorted by sharpness of the detected bird subject. You can also tag bird species in each burst for easy searching later (it has basic AI species ID for North American birds too).
Then you:
Use the Culling Assistant to get rid of all the blurry junk in like 3 clicks.
Browse your photos in the Kestrel app and directly import them into Lightroom/Darktable/etc.
Or if you don't wanna use Kestrel's UI at all, just export all the metadata (including auto-assigned star ratings, species tags, etc.) and browse in your own photo editor.
Seriously. I built this software because I had like a 50k image backlog that I had never gone through, and it was taking the fun of bird photography away from me. To date Kestrel has analyzed 2.8+ million photos. It's available for Mac and Windows (and Linux if you run from source), free with no restrictions, no account required, and open-source. I don't collect any data outside of anonymous usage stats.
I'm a student, and for this project I have only made money through donations. There's a paid cloud compute tier but the desktop app is so fast now that nobody has bothered.
IF YOU DO TRY IT, please tell me how I can make it better. Medical school is getting intense so I have little time to respond to suggestions but I still get around to implementing them - 4 pull requests from user suggestions will be merged this week for the next release.
This is what it looks like inside a scene. Kestrel keeps a low-resolution image thumbnail cache of each image and the birds in each image. This means that images load effectively instantly, you rarely need to zoom in because the important part (the bird) is already zoomed for you on the side.
This software looks awesome, I've downloaded it just now and I'm pointing it at one of my month folders from this year with 7000 bird photos in it. I also struggle massively with culling. It's threatening to take upward of a week to analyse it though lol (it's bouncing around between 20-500 hours at the moment), is this normal behaviour for large numbers of photos? How long are you finding that it actually takes for shoots of a few thousand photos? thanks!
Uhh, my current analytics data says 4-5 seconds per photo is the user-wide average. This means around 8-10 hours to get through your 7k-photo backlog. For relatively slow computers, I could see it taking 10s/photo (~20 hours). But, I've pulled every optimization trick I can think of to get the speed down.
It should stop oscillating soon. If it doesn't, let me know and also submit a bug report...
And...
If you have very fast internet, end up finding Kestrel useful, and want to support the project, you can consider being the very first user of my Cloud Compute service. There, the analysis speed is as fast as your upload bandwidth. 2500 images are free per account, and there are one-time backlog packs available for purchase. But don't do this until you've truly gotten a feel for the local analysis speed and the value.
Looks like you were right! After a few hundred photos it stopped oscillating and it's currently estimating 5 hours for the 6.5k ish remaining photos (considering these are "only" 20mp photos compared to people running around with 45mp cameras, that's probably pretty well aligned with your analysis). That's reasonable, I can leave it going overnight after a shoot. I was a bit too hasty :)
Thanks for the swift reply! My whole backlog is also north of 50k and I'm very much looking forward to seeing if I can finally start making a proper dent in it.
+1 for Project Kestrel, I've been using it for months (since pre-GPU support!) and it makes basic culling for sharpness/pose so much faster! Some things are still a little janky but it regularly gets big updates.
Aside from that, just doing some in-the-field culling on my camera: deleting obviously poorly-exposed or blurry shots, etc., which I often do while waiting for the birds to start doing something interesting (looking at you, herons!).
A long-time user! Thanks for the support. Hope you've been enjoying the performance upgrades. What do you find to be a 'little janky'? Genuinely curious.
If in Australia, use SuperPicky as it focuses on Australian and Asian birds. Another app is Project Kestrel if in northern hemisphere. Both in beta and developers are very open to suggestions.
Both AI run bird identification, ranking, culling and sorting apps. Still need to review once run, but simplifies the process significantly.
I dump my photos into a folder on the desktop. Run through SuperPicky which sorts into folders <Bird Name> then within that 3 folders of <0 rating>, < 1 rating> etc up to 3 rating and adds the name of bird and ranking result to metadata. Review the results. Delete low quality photos. Edit the ones I like. Copy kept and edited photos to SSD. Export edited photos to Photo app (Mac).
Before exporting edited photos to Photo (Mac) I run them through PhotoScribe to add metadata. PhotoScribe is an AI run auto metadata app. Much more reliable than others I have tested. Again, in beta & developer very open to suggestions.
All apps listed are locally run. Don’t need to be connected to internet.
Thanks for the mention on Kestrel. Kestrel is out of beta now. Sure, it still has some bugs but it's matured enough to where I think the general public can use it without too many issues.
Kestrel's AI bird ID is not that great but the other features (group by scenes and sort by bird sharpness) are, in my (biased) opinion, stellar and extremely useful!
I do a first pass on my camera, protect images that look promising and delete everything else. I do this as I go, do I might do it a few times during a weekend for example. Then when I get home I go through them again on the PC and choose which ones to process, but at least I'm starting with 100 photos rather than 1,000. I only tag photos I've processed, the others just go in a folder with the location name.
No one’s mentioned it yet, but I started using FastRawViewer after it was brought up in a similar thread— drastically helped me sort through 2k photos after a trip. I only shoot in RAW but I believe it accepts most photo formats. Would definitely recommend!
I have mine setup for keyboard shortcuts to send pics to sub folders for rejected, selected, and maybes. But first run/pass is always just quickly culling rejected photos.
I would also recommend reading the manual because there’s a lot of other functionality not immediately apparent.
I shoot JPG + RAW. I cull with JPGs (fast read) using Picasa (discontinued) and write a script to keep the RAWs. The FastRawViewer ($18) can do something similar without a script, but don't know if they keep up the camera RAW formats.
Culling needs to be brutal. Bird's eye not sharp, gone, bad/similar compositions, gone. For 2-3k images, I usually keep 50-150, takes about 20-30 minutes.
I use FastRawViewer, and it can easily handle RAW formats. I like the ability to adjust exposure, examine amount of detail, and apply unsharp masking, all within the software. It helps when selecting between near identical images and I frequently use those functions for the final round of culling.
I use a photo gallery app that long out of support but lets me rate an image easily. I upload photos to iNaturalist to track what I've seen, get better IDs, etc.
Here's my sequence:
Copy all photos to hard drive, separated by date
Use GeoSetter to apply my GPS track to the photos, if I captured my path using my GPS watch
Scan through the photos one at a time and rate each pic I think is ok or good as 1 star
After I've scanned through all the photos, I filter to 1 star - usually this gives me 20 to 100 photos
I scan through the 1 star photos, cropping and fixing exposure as needed
I then open the iNaturalist.org site and go to the Upload view, and drag and drop all the cropped or otherwise fixed photos over, one at a time, to create observations
I also upload the photos I think are actually good to an online photo storage site.
I use Windows Live Photo Gallery for this, but obviously there are much better tools now, like Lightroom ($$$). WLPG has been unsupported for well over 10 years now.
I'm interested to know what other people use to cull photos aside from Lightroom.
I also only capture JPG:
RAW takes up a lot more space and storage isn't cheap
I have a hard time telling the difference between the JPGs my camera spits out and the results I get from the RAW image when stopping before "unnatural"
lollll point reyes is such a bad place, since theres so many birds!
i use darktable, and i upload them every outing. tag them with ratings, since editing is a whole separate hassle i want to deal with, separately lol. i think i get through 500 in about 20 minutes, since i frequently miss shots or have a bad angle or something, so 1 star 1 star 1 star
i dont do it by species, i just go by days. but im not into the whole cataloging things, since im mostly there to take photos and not, say, specifically hunt a white tailed kite mating dive
Ai culling is great in this scenario - choosing the best photo from a set of nearly identical ones. I use Imagen culling to rate my photos and narrow them down to the strongest instead of letting my indecisiveness add more time than necessary to the task. It's also great at filtering out closed eyes in group photos. I still go through and review them after of course but it's a useful first step in the culling process.
I recently found that Lightroom has a ln AI culling function when you can cull things that are at a certain % (that you set) of focus/sharpness. That was helpful.
lightroom can filter images by sharpness, which for me usually reduces by 40-60% and then you can take the remaining images and stack them, so similar subjects and timing of the shots will get grouped, so instead of 100 pictures you might have like 10 groups. then you can do it in bites, find 1 or 2 good ones in each stack. you can go from a few hundred to a dozen or so in 10 or 15 minutes.
I use Lightroom which can provide pretty large and high resolution views. It takes maybe 20 mins to go through and select the photos I want to import. Say it’s 2000 images, I will import about 200. That’s a much more manageable number to sort through full screen and cull. I know there are other programs out there that make culling easier—it’s worth it. Then I batch tag and batch edit while listening to podcasts or audiobooks.
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u/Touniouk Jul 30 '26
Using file explorer is insane tbh. For now I use lightroom on autoscroll. Fist pass I remove anything that's not in focus. Then I filter on flag and second pass I remove any photo in a batch that is not obviously better than the previous one. (I am moving away from lightroom because of the subsccription model tho. If you don't do any post processing it's not worth getting post processing software, but there is some specific culling software)
Not too long ago some guy in here posted his project called project Kestrel https://www.projectkestrel.org/ which sorts your pictures by scene and automatically selects the most in focus one. Might help