One of the best ways to speed up organizing and annotating your photos is to delete a lot of them. But which ones should be deleted? And what if you make a mistake?
Two Step Approach
In the digital age, many people will take multiple pictures of the same topic, especially with people in the picture. This way, you get multiple chances to avoid problems with auto-focus, auto-exposure, closed eyes and odd expressions. So you may have as much as a 10:1 ratio of pictures to keepers. Ideally, you can do a first cull shortly after the pictures are taken, actually deleting half or more of the original, essentially duplicate images. Then, when you’re organizing and annotating your images, a second cull can separate inferior images from the keepers, deleting nothing.
First Cull
My favorite tool for the first cull is a basic photo viewing app, such as Windows Photo, Windows File Explorer or Android QuickPic. It’s obvious: page through the pictures and delete about half of the worst takes. The sooner you can do this after taking the images, the better – but maybe you’ll do it months later, just seconds before doing the second cull. But it’s quick – if you’re like me, about half the pictures you take are obviously not worth the media it takes to store them (about $0.004 at the moment).
Second Cull
For the second cull, you have a better batch of pictures, since the obviously poor shots have already been deleted. It’s harder to decide what to keep. So don’t. As you’re creating your sortable, descriptively named folders, create a folder within each called Other. Simply move less desirable pictures to the Other folder, and forget about them. I use the cull feature of MetaCaption for this – that’s the fastest and most reliable way to do the cull. But you can also use something like Windows File Explorer in large thumbnail view for this if you take some care that you move them to the right folder. You still have the overhead of having to store and back up the low-value images, but you’ve saved the most valuable resource they might consume: your time.