I've been thinking lately about the amount of time spent on processing and have decided it REALLY needs to be cut down. The question is how to approach it.
First the background: 1500-2000 photos shared by two cameras. Some of these are single shots, most are short bursts. Let's say an average burst of five frames. Most times the subject is redundant, that is to say I have need to shoot the same subject several times, some as few as 2, but many as much as 5 or 6.
Second, normal workflow, or what I've been doing: I start by going through each burst and determining which of the frames is the one I want to process, then I delete the rest. I do this for each separate single shot or burst. Just for illustration, we'll say the single shots are 100 or so and the rest are bursts. So:
1750 frames/avg - 100 = 1650 burst frames, /5 on average = 330 keepers. (provided of course I don't screw up).
Of the 330 keepers many are redundant as described above. Call it an average of 4 redundancies per subject, so:
330/4 = 82 separate subjects, each with 4 keeper shots. Add the 100 single frame shots and I have 182 photos to process.
Many of the single shots could again be the same subject. The thing is I do not need 4-6 shots of the same subject, I only need the best one. In some cases maybe two are worth it, and in a very rare case three.
What I need to do is figure out a way to sort and cull these quickly. I use Darktable, so not a lot of file management. I would like to figure out a quick method to get all of the shots of each subject in a single place, then look through them and decide which one is the keeper. In other words, all 20+/- frames together before culling.
The only thing I have come up with so far is to create a folder for each subject, then dig through the shots and move each to it's respective folder. That would save me processing time but increase culling time to the extent it may not help.
I can't be the only one who has to sort through this number of shots, some of you have to be doing it efficiently. How do you tackle it?
First the background: 1500-2000 photos shared by two cameras. Some of these are single shots, most are short bursts. Let's say an average burst of five frames. Most times the subject is redundant, that is to say I have need to shoot the same subject several times, some as few as 2, but many as much as 5 or 6.
Second, normal workflow, or what I've been doing: I start by going through each burst and determining which of the frames is the one I want to process, then I delete the rest. I do this for each separate single shot or burst. Just for illustration, we'll say the single shots are 100 or so and the rest are bursts. So:
1750 frames/avg - 100 = 1650 burst frames, /5 on average = 330 keepers. (provided of course I don't screw up).
Of the 330 keepers many are redundant as described above. Call it an average of 4 redundancies per subject, so:
330/4 = 82 separate subjects, each with 4 keeper shots. Add the 100 single frame shots and I have 182 photos to process.
Many of the single shots could again be the same subject. The thing is I do not need 4-6 shots of the same subject, I only need the best one. In some cases maybe two are worth it, and in a very rare case three.
What I need to do is figure out a way to sort and cull these quickly. I use Darktable, so not a lot of file management. I would like to figure out a quick method to get all of the shots of each subject in a single place, then look through them and decide which one is the keeper. In other words, all 20+/- frames together before culling.
The only thing I have come up with so far is to create a folder for each subject, then dig through the shots and move each to it's respective folder. That would save me processing time but increase culling time to the extent it may not help.
I can't be the only one who has to sort through this number of shots, some of you have to be doing it efficiently. How do you tackle it?