| Rick McEvoy Photography

I have written about this before. And now I have to just get on and do it.

I started my image culling process with the 2006 collection of 449 images. This is enough images to enable me to try out what I thought I was going to – this was my trial.

And what did I find out from this trial?

I need to simplify culling on my IPad

I was picking, rejecting, having images with no flag and also assigning star ratings.

I need to go with this.

Pick

Reject
Nothing else.

On my IPad, using Lightroom Mobile, this is a simple matter of swipe up to pick and swipe down to reject. I do not want anything with no flags – I am going to force myself to make a positive choice either way.

In fact now I think about it, whilst writing this post, I will mark every image as a reject, forcing me to pick images that I want to keep. This I will have to do to the collection in Lightroom on my PC. So all I have to do is swipe up when I want to keep an image, and swipe right to go to the next one. If I don’t want the image I don’t have to do anything.

I can also do this on my PC of course, but the point is that I can sit down and relax on the sofa and go through a years worth of images, or anywhere else I want to.

Once again giving myself the time to think about an issue has enabled me to come up with a logical, simplified solution.

Once I have done this first cull I will then delete the rejects on my PC in Lightroom.

And then they are gone. Forever.

I will probably go through this process a couple of times as I am not that good at getting rid of my images. Once I get started though I am sure I will get rid of lots of stuff.

And I can also assign stars to images I want to edit on my IPad if I want to.

My initial trawl of 2006 was mainly of pictures taken in Chile.

From those 449 images from that year I have managed to come up with the following

Picks 99

No flag 135
Rejects 215

This was my first pass in what I am considering a trial.

So I have deleted the rejects, and removed the pick flag, leaving 234 images.

I will go back through the images I have culled and revisit the picks/ rejects. Then I will delete the images I do not want in Lightroom. And then I will assign star ratings to images worth editing, whatever they may be of.

As I do 99% of my editing in Lightroom on my PC this is fine. And as all my images are stored on an external hard drive connected to my PC this makes even more sense.

There is one issue I will need to contend with at some point – I will have backups of images I have since deleted. One for another time – I will worry about that when my 4 TB hard drive is full.

I have narrowed down exactly what I use Lightroom Mobile for to the following

Reviewing
Picking/ rejecting

Sharing/ posting
Browsing, thinking, ideas.

And quick edits as and when I want to do them.

The rest I do in Lightroom on my PC.

And the good news is that the 215 rejects from the initial trawl is nearly 50% of the images. These are images that I do not want to edit, do not want to keep, or are duplicates of edited images. Only another 45,000 images to go!

Another thing sorted.

And it means I can still go through all my catalogues any place, any time, anywhere.

Someone should use that in an advert……..

And if you are younger than me you will not get that joke

OK enough from me. Someone get me a Martini!

Next is one image from those lovely keepers which I have re-edited and will post tomorrow on my blog.