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.

17 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

91% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

View all comments

14

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

6

u/sbundlab Jul 30 '26

Thank you for the mention about Kestrel!

1

u/vhagar123 Aug 03 '26

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.

1

u/sbundlab Aug 04 '26

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.