workflow culling event images

This may or may not be the place for this. I just did 2 events and I am very happy with how my pictures came out. Too happy. They had me take candid shots mostly but some posed. It was over 6 hours total prob closer to 6 1/2 over 2 days. One a grad party one an anniversary with a religious ceremony including a reenactment of the wedding. Anyway. I haven't looked at all my pictures yet just a glance. They wanted a lot of candids, some posed. and a lot of the ceremony which lasted a few hours. They were very specific to get all the guests (prob 125 each day) and "all the kids and extended family" in candid shots, etc.

I think I have 1500 pictures. Now when I do posed pictures (pretty much all the family and extended requested that) I take about 5 or so. To cover the event of 1 person having eyes closed, etc. So some of those are easy to cull out.

Then there will be some blurry ones, eyes closed, funny face type stuff. Or just missed shots with the candids. But I didnt see a TON of those.

for the record I don't hold down the button either.

But does anyone care to share their workflow. I mean I could go through the "acceptable" candids but I feel like I'd be just deleting some for the sake of deleting them to cut the #s. But obviously you can't prepare that many images either.

For the record I did a lower "event fee" and they will come to buy the pictures they choose later. I advised them I pull some of my favorites, edit them as examples, and we'll discuss the ones they want to purchase and their approval of my edits at the viewing apt.

But I can't have them go through 1500 or maybe even 1000 pics.
Please give me some advice on an acceptable #.

(I don't do a ton of events but I do get request for them and I do enjoy doing them. With the exception of weddings, if this ordering apt goes well I may start to actually advertise in this niche.. but I need a plan first…. it may be that in retrospect a lower event fee and ordering session is not the way to go and instead just go back to the "disk" too. Unsure at this point)

Well, when I do a fair-size shoot, first I'll trash the obvious ones, like you said.

From there, I'll go through a set of similar shots and examine each set I'll typically choose one or maybe two and "flag" it/them. When I've done that those are the ones I'll get to work on.

Different folks have different methods of "flagging". What you do depends on the software you use and then the workflow you prefer. I use Lightroom and it has several convenient ways to flag a photo, both flagging some as "P"icks and some as "x" Rejects. Lightroom also has a couple methods available for those who like to be more "selective" of their processes, colored "banners" being one and then "Number" flags being another. And Lightroom has a quick and easy way to filter so that you are only viewing the "flags" that you want to.

Another thing LR has that is nice is the "Quick Collection, so you can put all kinds of shots there from different folders if you wish and just work with them, and do it all together!

But hey, enough about me (and Lightroom), what software do you have for this?

I have LR and PS. I use them both with on one and nik too. But I won't do that extensive of edits on these candid shots, prob just LR adjustments and things. I'll do more PS and stuff on the posed pictures I choose. I do not use the "flag" system in LR yet so that is an option to investigate tomorrow for me. Thank you. So at what point do you delete the ones you didnt "positively flag" in LR? Or do you always keep them. When I do a session I delete the obvious ones in LR. Then from those left I simply pick out there and export which ones I prefer, into a folder. When I am then going through and doing PS edits I choose from my "folder of choices". But that's for a session and that's when I am usually only coming up with 20-40 most. I'm not going to do that with this. It's too much.

I need to start key wording and stuff in LR more. Right now I just organize things by date…..If I want to find a session from years back I have to find the dated folder on an external hard drive. One might think this could be a problem but thus far I have found FB to be an accurate "time stamp" more or less of when much of my work was done if I absolutely can't remember the date or find it on ical. I seem to also have a pretty decent memory to remember the dates of sessions oddly enuf. But nothing is sorted in LR aside from by "sorted by date" and now that's becoming a pain. I need to start using LR to the full capacity to help with sorting images like this with in a big event and making my work easier.

I use bridge to cull. I get rid of everything I don't deem to be of the minimum quality I'm prepared to supply. A simple keep or reject as I have no in-between standard. I don't keyword, I don't rate, I don't colour label. I keep things as simple as possible which increases my efficiency dramatically. This leaves me with however many shots it leaves me with. FWIW when I shoot I also cull in camera. From about 1300 images loaded on to the computer I generally end up with about 700-800 I'll keep. On a good day I can cull 1300-1500 in about an hour and a half.

As to the reject photos, in a shoot of any size, I'll flag them as "Rejects" (use the "x" key as a shortcut or click the Reject/darker "X" flag. At the same time I'm likely to flag one or two out of a set to work on, so I flag it as a "Pick", using the "p" shortcut or clicking on the white "Pick" flag.

From there, whenever I want to, I can go to the Filters tool (on the right side above the film strip), and either select a filter "choice" from the drop-down list or pick by right-clicking on one of the flags.

You have different choices depending on your method. For example, you can choose "Rejects Only" by right-clicking on a flag. Do that, and all your Rejects in that folder/film strip will show up. Then, do the Ctl/Cmd-a shortcut to Select All, then you can do Delete (Delete key, Backspace, Right-click on one of your selected photos and choose Delete).

After you've done that you can change the Filters mode to "Flagged Photos" to show only the Picks, or just turn Filters off to show all the photos (the Picks have a little white flag that shows in the upper left corner).

As to " key wording and stuff", well, yes! If you want to use Lightroom and get the most of it, use the tools! In time, as your volume grows keywording becomes pretty important so you can quickly get to a shoot/photo that you want, although with Lightroom there are several methods that can be used together. In fact, I use Folders as the "basis" of my file organization, broken up by Year "parent" folders. That is, in fact, to me a "good, old-fashioned" approach that works. But I've also put on keywords and, with Lightroom I've put photos into Collections, and then, hey, LR gives you even the ability to view according to camera, lens, aperture, etc, just by going to the top of the grid section, and that can be a cool feature! Suppose you wanted to go to a shoot of, say, 1,000 photos, and then you wanted to view only the photos of a guitar player that you shoot with an aperture of f/4...it's easy!

Surprised no one has mentioned star ratings.

Go through all your photos one by one, with the auto advance feature enabled. Use the Reject flag (X) for obvious rejects (missed focus, bad exposure, etc.), 1 star for images you don't like, 2 stars for images you like and might want to process, 3 stars for images you really like. This should be a quick, knee-jerk decision. What does your gut tell you as soon as you see the image? Spend no more than 1 second on each image.

Now, delete the rejects and filter on 2 and 3 star images only. Hopefully you'll have filtered out at least 50% of your original image count now. Go back through them again. You'll find a lot of very similar images, so start changing the star rating to 1 on images that you don't like as much, and that will drop them out of your filtered view.

After the 2nd pass you may still have too many images so this is where you start using the Survey view. Group remaining similar images together in Survey so you can see them all on the screen at the same time, and use the 1 star flag to demote the ones you don't want and 3 star flag to promote your favorites.

There you go, now filter on 3 star images and start processing them.

CincyTriGuy wrote in post #16950766
Surprised no one has mentioned star ratings.

Go through all your photos one by one, with the auto advance feature enabled. Use the Reject flag (X) for obvious rejects (missed focus, bad exposure, etc.), 1 star for images you don't like, 2 stars for images you like and might want to process, 3 stars for images you really like. This should be a quick, knee-jerk decision. What does your gut tell you as soon as you see the image? Spend no more than 1 second on each image.

Ah, a good example of my brain being not "up to speed"! In my first post I mentioned the use of color banners and then a "number flag", what I forgot is the setting of the numbers shortcuts 0-5 actually set the Star ratings (0 flags up to 5 flags)

And then the Banner colors can be set (or removed) with the keyboard shortcuts 6-9.

Funny, I just don't have a habit of using the stars and/or banners, I keep it pretty simple and use the flags, with the habit of just hitting "p"/pick, "x"/reject and "u"/remove a flag.

tonylong wrote in post #16951079
Ah, a good example of my brain being not "up to speed"! In my first post I mentioned the use of color banners and then a "number flag", what I forgot is the setting of the numbers shortcuts 0-5 actually set the Star ratings (0 flags up to 5 flags)

And then the Banner colors can be set (or removed) with the keyboard shortcuts 6-9.

Funny, I just don't have a habit of using the stars and/or banners, I keep it pretty simple and use the flags, with the habit of just hitting "p"/pick, "x"/reject and "u"/remove a flag.

The thing about using star ratings instead of flags to pick the ones you want to process is that once you're finished, your images are already rated as well. So if you're applying keywords on import like you should be then it's super easy to create smart collections for things like your favorite images from a certain event, time period, subject, etc. If you're using flags then you'd still need to go back and apply star ratings later.

My wedding workflow.

For me it's really simple, review in Lightroom and flag as Picks the ones I like. Delete everything else. Sometimes you have got to be brutal.

I move through the set using *** to denote the photo will probably be returned (or will be cloned from to complete a group shot with a blinker e.g.) and flag photos that are clearly to be deleted (ambient test shots, shots of my shoes, shots of my hand to check flash exposure at different positions). I only delete (from the hard drive) those flagged shots at this point and don't delete more until I've given the finished disc back to the couple.

I don't know how LR is for loading pics but Bridge takes forever to load a full card. I prefer to sort in DPP, using the quick check tool if it's a lot, and just rate the ones I want to keep then select and drag those into a folder. I'll then open those in Bridge and go from there, that way Bridge doesn't have to load the full card which a lot end up getting deleted anyway.

Diver-Down wrote in post #16958801
I don't know how LR is for loading pics but Bridge takes forever to load a full card.

I have LR configured to build full size previews on import which definitely makes the import process take longer. But I can just fire off an import then do something else while it's working. The benefit is that once it's done it's much quicker to move between images and zoom in/out.

Diver-Down wrote in post #16958801
I don't know how LR is for loading pics but Bridge takes forever to load a full card. I prefer to sort in DPP, using the quick check tool if it's a lot, and just rate the ones I want to keep then select and drag those into a folder. I'll then open those in Bridge and go from there, that way Bridge doesn't have to load the full card which a lot end up getting deleted anyway.

Hmm, off-hand I'd say you likely have issues "under the hood", 'cause Bridge doesn't have that reputation!

Our systems have a lot of complexities, and things can come up and "bite" us, seemingly out of nowhere, it can be a real headache to troubleshoot things!

tonylong wrote in post #16959506
Hmm, off-hand I'd say you likely have issues "under the hood", 'cause Bridge doesn't have that reputation!

Our systems have a lot of complexities, and things can come up and "bite" us, seemingly out of nowhere, it can be a real headache to troubleshoot things!

In Bridge the photos show up right away but it's waiting for the "thumbnail extractions" to complete that takes so long for me and the files are slow to view till that's done. I thought that was normal for Bridge but maybe I do have some issues ?