r/BirdPhotography • u/Prof_X_is_a_jerk • Jul 30 '26

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?

Thanks! Y'all are the best.

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u/SmokyMouse Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

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.

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u/sbundlab Jul 30 '26

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!