How do you sort your photographs? How do you examine them?

I've had a long photo trip and after the first sorting of all I've shot there are about 1000 photos left, and all of them seem quite good to me. I started the second round of sorting, but stuck when i realized that they all look fine to me. So how do you judge your own works?

 

I'd be lucky to have 10 keepers out of 1000 lol, not saying to judge by my numbers by any means...I just practice a lot.

Either you are really really great, or you need to be more selective of what is "good" and what is a tosser. ;-)

 

so basically this is the point of the topic, how to select, what is really good

 

Out of focus, instant delete. I don't care if it's a picture of my kids or not. If it's crap, it's crap.

I have a bunch of pictures of my kids - I don't need to save the bad ones.

Duplicates? I'll save the best one or two and delete the rest. Don't need 10 nearly identical pictures...


The qualifier I use is - "Would I print this?"
If the answer is no, delete.

 

I cull in lightroom in survey mode. select all the same-ish images to look at at once. Pick the BEST composition - star it - make sure its sharp and then go to the next batch. Even if they are all good - there will be somethat are better. Viewing side by side is the best way to select which is best.

 

I am getting to this point mentally as well. Unless they are practice pics for editing purposes.

 

After a while you get more selective in the shots you take. On a good day, I might have 90%+ keepers. On a bad day it's closer to 40 or 50%.

 

I go through them all one by one first and delete any that are out of focus or bad in a way I can't edit...then I do side by sides of the similar pics and pick the best one or two to work with. I usually get about 10-20 out of 100 that I can work with, but I take about 5 shots of the same thing so I can choose the best.

 

If you want to know how pros do it, get the inexpensive book - The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

Since your query doesn't seem to have anything to do with any business of photography aspects, it's now here in the forum section where the image sorting part of graphics program's software would go.

Good images are properly exposed, have good composition, are sharply focused and have the desired DoF, no one has their eyes closed, and there are no blue porta potties recognizable in the background.

 

The only images I ever delete are the totally OOF and severely over- and under-exposed.

Anything I edit, I rate with one start.

The best of the day's shoot gets two stars.

At the end of the year, I take all my two-star images and upgrade 10-15% of 'em to three stars.

If I'm particularly proud of a given image, I might rate it 4 stars.... but this is extremely rare.

I can rate images up to 5 stars, but have yet to use that yet.


Sort? I create a file sub-directory and rename all the images with the same name. So if I were to shoot a rose, I would create a sub-directory called "Rose 2012_6_16". All the images would be transferred to there, and renamed (Rose 2012_6_16 ffff nnn", ffff being the original DSC filenumber and nnn starting at 001 and continuing sequentially.

I use ViewNX2 to quickly view and rate my images, and transfer them to Capture for initial editing.

 

Ive got a system where I go thru all the photos I had shot, and save only the ones I like to a seperate folder. Mostly depending on lighting/focus/facial expressions/ and poses. Out of 100 I usually keep around 60-70. Then depending on what the photos are for I go thru the ones I saved just as I did the others and narrow it down further.

 

thank you for the tipping, already in my kindle