My Lightroom quick tip of the week for this week is about how I deal with images from a long trip. By way of an example, I am sorting out my pictures of a recent trip to Corfu.

Using this set of pictures taken in Corfu, I started off with 1150 images. Most of these are bracketed sets of images, so that is over 3000 images. Well over 3000. Which is quite a lot to sort.

3500 images from one trip. 

I do not want to keep all these images, neither do I want to necessarily keep every bracketed set of three images where one will suffice, especially where I have no intention of creating an image using HDR Merge.

I then add folders for specific locations, one being the resort we stopped in, where I took lots of similar images again on separate days in different lighting conditions. Another folder is Corfu Town, and another a particular building in Corfu Town.

I have multiple shots of a jetty I took a fancy to, taken from different angles on different days in different light.. To make sense of these images they go in a sub-folder entitled, wait for it, Jetty.

I do not want all of these images, but I want to look at them all together as cohesive groups of images. This helps me make my picks. The ones i want to keep. The ones I want to work on. My keepers.

I could do this in Collections, I but prefer to do this in folders as it just works better for me, and I can permanently delete images from folders, which I cant do from Collections. 

This is another thing I do which helps me cull my images.

To recap, this is how I cull my images,

This is the process I follow to organise my images in Lightroom.

1. Import the images (to my Lightroom Catalogue on my hard drive, with the actual files being saved on my external hard drive).
2. On import I also do the following
3. Create a duplicate back up set. 
4. Apply develop presets. 
5. Add to a new Collection. 
6. ONce the images are all imported, I break down the set of imges into folders as described above.
7. Then I go through the images, and rate them, 
8. THis is my rating system
9. I delete the unwanted images permanently. 
10. Finally I apply keywords to the images I want, and process the images I want to process. 

I have an automated cloud backup that works silently in th background providing a separate copy somewhere else. 

And that is it . 

Thanks for reading this post, and please call back tomorrow to my blog for something else, not sure what yet as i have not written it yet! 

Rick McEvoy Photography Blog – Lightroom Tip of the Week

Thursday 3rd November 2016

www.rickmcevoyphotography.co.uk