The purge

Nostromo

Nostromo

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Name
Dominic
Edit My Images
Yes
I've been having a clear out of my back catalogue on my hard drive. Not because i need the space particularly, but more because I'm going to move it to an external hard drive, which won't be a speedy process (I have about 15,000 photos to move, a mixture of mainly RAW, but also JPEG).
As I was going through my photos, I came to realise that I keep some c**p stuff. Photos that I'm never going to look at again or use for anything, oof, boring, no real merit.
I really should be more ruthless when importing my photos or straight after I've finished editing.
So far I've deleted about 60gb and I'm halfway through my library.
 
I know the feeling. There’s nothing quite like a full hard drive to make you become extra choosy on what to keep. However when hard drives reach a ridiculous size I am not sure if that will be easy.
 
Good Luck! I know the feeling, but I personally am too lazy to sort them out so I just zip the photos up into months and then zip the months into years and just leave them and forget about them. This way I don't have to go through them, lazyness wins! haha. Hard drives are not too expensive these days, storage is a pain in the butt though!
 
I have flick through my LR catalogue every so often to try and get rid of stuff.

It is funny though how often I’ve found something and thought ’why the heck didn’t I process that?’ Stuff that, for some reason, I didn’t give a second look at time of import. Maybe it’s looking again on a different day, in a different mood or with better editing skills that changed my mind. If I’d ruthlessly culled stuff at time of import I’d have missed/lost them.
 
As part of my LR import process, the first thing I do is mark images for deletion if not needed and this is about 40% and then delete them. I then colour code, rate and Keyword. I may have to spend 30 mins or so for a typical import but it is well worth it as I am paid back when it come to future searches; I can find what I want in a fraction of a second from 30,000+ photos. I am aware that very few at my club are as disciplined as this but then they are often moaning that they cannot find a particular image.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
As part of my LR import process, the first thing I do is mark images for deletion if not needed and this is about 40% and then delete them. I then colour code, rate and Keyword. I may have to spend 30 mins or so for a typical import but it is well worth it as I am paid back when it come to future searches; I can find what I want in a fraction of a second from 30,000+ photos. I am aware that very few at my club are as disciplined as this but then they are often moaning that they cannot find a particular image.

Dave
Click to expand...
Lordy, I wish I was as organised as you. Something to aspire to I think.
 
Dave Canon said:
As part of my LR import process, the first thing I do is mark images for deletion if not needed and this is about 40% and then delete them. I then colour code, rate and Keyword. I may have to spend 30 mins or so for a typical import but it is well worth it as I am paid back when it come to future searches; I can find what I want in a fraction of a second from 30,000+ photos. I am aware that very few at my club are as disciplined as this but then they are often moaning that they cannot find a particular image.

Dave
Click to expand...

This made me chuckle. I used to run an LR course at our college, and almost every student (many from camera clubs!) had an out of control amount of images. It was the thing that depressed them the most about their hobby. After going through the Library module's capability in depth, and running a short session on curating, the feedback I got was that that was the best part of the course. The Develop module (which was most important to some students) ended up being relegated to the end - because really - it's just slider playing.

Dealing with image management on import is huge. The longer you leave it, the bigger the job, the less inclined you get and thus, the problem gets worse.

Also, with Lightroom, you can delete them from the library but leave them on disk. If you're absolutely terrified to delete anything, just remove it from the library. It'll still be there for that day (the one that never comes around) when you decide to go back and look at it. It's like putting stuff in the loft.
 
Harlequin565 said:
Also, with Lightroom, you can delete them from the library but leave them on disk. If you're absolutely terrified to delete anything, just remove it from the library. It'll still be there for that day (the one that never comes around) when you decide to go back and look at it. It's like putting stuff in the loft.
Click to expand...

I agree when I have been teaching LR many will just not make the effort even though they can see the longer term benefit. As far as deleting something I might need, it has only happened once but no problem at all. When I import to LR, I automatically make a copy on my NAS. At my club we have competitions for the odd set subject or genre so I might need to search for an image after a certain date, Green (meaning a finally edited image), 4* or higher and Keyword (e.g. Portrait, Red). I actually find using LR the way it is intended more enjoyable not less.
 
I believe a good clear out / down is worth doing once or twice a year.
I try to delete any images from a holiday, shoot, photo session which are either not sharp or composition is poor.

That way I am half way done on clear down.
Then I go through them again for for any other imperfections.
Then I will import the remaining images in to LightRoom.

I do agree Hard Drives ( HD ) are cheap ATM. A western Digital ue 4TB HD are Ninety odd quid ATM. Which is not bad really.
So my Xmas present to myself in the new is a 4TB HD.
 
I have just got a 6TB Seagate Hub for £80 delivered! As I have got my drone and am getting more marine work again, with video requirement - that storage very quickly disappears. My Intention is to keep video and stills seperately, but then I know I will want a still picture to drop into a video at some point and then I will be juggling wires into the computer, I only have ONE USB input. Or at least only one I have found, and there is no DVD drive either, so I am stuffed with most of my archive... I shall have to use the old confuser to load the DVDs, go through them, save what I want onto the hard drive and then be able to access stuff from the early 00s - everything prior to 2006 was on transparency. I might get a scanner and see if I can svae a load, or might hive it off to someone else to just do the best, but to be honest I am not sure I can be bothered. Life is too short to worry about them now.
 
An interesting read.

Until about 12 months ago, I was shooting with Nikon equipment but generally in jpeg and editing in the basic Windows photo editor bundled with Win 7.
I found the ediing programme to be sufficient for 90% of my needs.
At the beginniing of 2020 a lot of factors combined to move me away from my previous practices.
  1. Win 7 became no longer supported and Win 10 did not support the Win photo editor.
  2. PC pretty old and quite slow and could not cope with LR
  3. My camera equipment started to feel cumbersome , particularly as I was taking more shots because of the lockdowns, particularly wildlife on our exercise walk
So I sold my Nikon stuff, went wholly to MFT, purchased a new PC from a local shop and started to shoot only RAW.
l had a lot of learning to do and still have a long way to go.
I read Scott Kelby's LR book and was particularly taken by his enthusiasm for the cataloguing aspect of LR and I have tried to use the Import phase to catalogue properly so that I can find photos and group them efficiently.
I have a 500gb SSD and a 4tb HDD and a couple of external hard drives, so storage is not an issue at the moment.
However I am still uncertain as to how to handle the LR catalogue.
I import with LR to the SSD and then the usual pp and export as jpeg to a 2020 JPEG folder.
The RAW stays on the SSD as part of the catalogue.
However now as we move to 2021 I want to be able to cull and 'park' some of the 2020 stuff that I have not used ( I print quite a few books and individual shots) . I want to move them to the HDD but still retain easy access.
How do I do this?
At the moment I gain access through LR but if i move the 2020 folders to the HDD then LR will not be able to find them because they will go from the C drive to the E drive?
Do I need to add the E drive as a Folder in LR and then move the 2020 photo folders from the C to the E?

I have read through this and even I find it a bit confusing :) but I hope that someone can grasp what I am on about and comment.
Happy New Year:)
 
superpippo said:
At the moment I gain access through LR but if i move the 2020 folders to the HDD then LR will not be able to find them because they will go from the C drive to the E drive?
Do I need to add the E drive as a Folder in LR and then move the 2020 photo folders from the C to the E?
Click to expand...
The way I did this was to move the folders from one drive to another, then in LR it shows the original folder with a "?" to indicate it can't find the folder. Right Clicking on this entry enabled me to select "Find folder" (or similar) and navigate to the new location. It then moves the location from your original drive to the new drive.
 
@superpippo : You can move images from one drive to another from entirely within Lightroom. Lightroom makes it REALLY easy for you to do this.

Before you start, create the folder on the HDD that you want to put all the images into. Call it "2020 Archive" or suchlike.

Then, in Lightroom select all the images you want to move. You can do this by, for example, putting them all into the Quick Collection. Or you can make a selection based on date range in the Metadata filter. Ensure all the images you want to move are selected i.e. they have a lighter box around them. You can simply do CTRL-A to select all images in a collection.

In Lightroom, in the left pane you'll see Navigator, Catalog, Folders, Collections. Click on the little triangle on the left of "Folders" and it will expand all the drives you have on your computer. You should see be able to navigate to your "2020 Archive" folder on your HDD.

Then simply drag all your selected images into the "2020 Archive" folder, and LR will move them all for you, and crucially LR will remember where they are for future use. This means that you don't need to worry about the "?" that appears on each image if you move it outside of Lightroom. LR will ask you to confirm you want to move the image on disk when you do this.

You might want to try it with just a single image initially, to check it's all worked OK.

Simple as.
 
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Nostromo said:
I really should be more ruthless when importing my photos or straight after I've finished editing.
So far I've deleted about 60gb and I'm halfway through my library.
Click to expand...

Every time I do an import, I go through all the imported photos to see what they are like. Then I'll go through them all again and pick or reject them. I usually do this very quickly, using the "previous import" selection, setting CAPS-Lock on, and hitting P or X to Pick or eXclude each image. With CAPS-Lock on, LR automatically advances to the next image once you've picked or rejected. Picked images will have the little flag set to white. Rejected images will have the little flag set to black with an X through it.

I'll then work on the picked images, do edits and general fiddling about. I'll then mark each picked image with a number of stars, where 5 stars is a portfolio quality shot, 4 is one I'm impressed with myself for :) and 3 is average. Anything below 3 is general bytewadding on my hard drive, but I keep them anyway.

At some time in the future, I'll then delete all the rejects. This is tremendously easy to do. Simply go to All Photographs and hit CTRL-backspace. This will select all images with the reject flag, and ask if you want to delete them.

Doing things this way allows me to keep things under control. A small amount of effort on import results in a much more efficient catalogue.

Also, generally on import I'll set some keywords that are applied to all imported images. I'll then keyword anything that I give 3 or more stars to with more specific keywords that describe the image.

Lastly, once every couple of years, I'll export a whole year of images as a catalogue onto an external backup hard drive (in addition to the regular backups I have). So I'll typically have a working "General" catalogue with all my picked images from 2-3 years. Anything older than that gets exported as catalogue to a dedicated backup drive. Exporting as a catalogue creates a catalogue specifically for those images, with all edits etc. When you want to play with those images, just open the catalogue from the backup drive and you have everything there for you to work on.
 
I've never really got on with Lightroom - hate the develop module with a passion and always end up processing in ACR in Photoshop (yeh yeh, I know...). But I do use it to import, catalogue, and I do have an organisation system - which is a miracle for me!

I spent a good period of time going through and star rating my photos a year or 2 ago, which was a mammoth task with 100,000 images, and my logic is anything less than 3 stars should be binned. However I've still not deleted any! Or .jpg duplicates of RAW files during the period I was shooting both. I just throw hard disks at my computer! I know that I could probably safely lose a couple of tb of photos, but for some reason can't bring myself to do it!
 
I'm quite good at culling after import but I still end up with quite a lot of "snaps" which I want to keep for reference or nostalgia but that I am never going to process/print so a while ago I found a LR add-on which "publishes" JPGS from a collection so I can drag the snaps into the collection and then publish them to an Archive directory and it also has the option to delete the original RAWs. The advantage of this add-on is that it mirrors the original folder structure so it keeps the year/date hierarchy. I have added the Archive folder to the LR catalogue so I can still use LR to view/search the Archive.
 
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