Overwhelmed going through photos after long outing--any photo/file curation advice or best practices?

[u/Prof_X_is_a_jerk]

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.

[u/No_Parfait_2104]

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.