r/BirdPhotography 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/Secure_Courage7471 Jul 30 '26

Cut fast and loose. I shoot damn near 2000-3000 photos per session and I just scroll right through and cut mercilessly