AI program for culling?

[Marsha Jane]

This is in reference to AfterShoot:

• I feel it is a personal judgement. How well AfterShoot works depends a lot on the outing or images in a file. When I shot BIF I get a lot of similar images from shooting bursts at 20 fps. This is also the case with if I stay on a bird like a kingfisher and take lots of shots diving from a perch. AfterShoot, for the cases I've tried, puts similar shots in a group and uses it's algorithm to select the best.
• However if my photo outing produces all or many distinct images then you get a lot of distinct images out of the program and AfterSHoot would be of less utility.
• AfterShoot also is designed to eliminate selected images by hitting a programmed key, by default "X" - the way a wedding photographer would work. Unfortunately this is backwards for wildlife shooting. The problem is to go through the selected images and easily flag those you want to keep - not delete - since I delete a lot more than I keep - the opposite of event photography. Using AfterShoots colors and stars does let you do this without modification. My work-around was to go into settings and make the maximum rating the AfterShoot culling process yields 4 stars. I find it relatively simple to go through the resulting 4 star array of AfterShoot selected images and hit 5 for the ones I may want to look at further.
• When the images are saved I need to select them by rating - 5 stars - on the save page

Using this modified method I have found AfterShoot a big help for the case where I have many images that look similar, that is the case for me when I go out to shoot BIF. For example coming back from shooting flying eagles at Conowingo and having 1000 or so eagle shots on a good day. If ( I wish) I was on a safari and came back with a 1000 shots of different mammals in different positions the AfterShoot would be less useful.

I also use AfterShoot to ingest images from my card. When I finish the AfterShoot culling and my 5 star cull I just save the resulting 5 star images on my computer.

I am still evaluating AfterShoot but so far, using this modified approach of setting 4 stars as the maximum for AfterShoot, going through the array and hitting 5 to only pick the one I want to consider further I find AfterShoot saves me a lot of time. Indeed I may miss an image from doing it all manually but I can get through a stack of images from a day shooting BIF in minutes an only copy the images I want to consider further on my computer.

I tend to come home with many similar images since I try to focus on BIF. For me I am thinking $10 a month is not a lot of money if it can save me hours going through lots of BIF images.

I still have 25 days to go and I plan on going out often to evaluate AfterShoot and play with my new lens.

As I stated at the outset - a personal decision. It also depends on the type of shooting on a specific set of images.

I like your method, and will try on a different set. I also think that it's best, as you indicated, to ingest images from a card, so as not to clutter computer.

 

[Replytoken]

I am going to give Narrative Select a try, too, on the "keepers" (almost 500) from AfterShoot.

Disappointing for us Windows users as it appears to only be available for the Mac OS.

--Ken

 

[O]

Having just returned from Bosque del Apache with thousands of photos, I am getting bogged down culling. Is there an AI program out there to assist in culling wildlife (specifically, bird) images? I am looking for one that I can use either on my iPad iPro, or Mac desktop. Thank you!

One of the reasons i shoot 5 to 12 fps selectively and rarely 20 fps, i use IPhoto only on my old Mac tower i can scream through images quickly make a short list then copy onto the main computer, i hear you can do this all in LR or Bridge in PS.
I keep some of my older desktops for this an other reasons, they are never connected to the internet.
Only an opinion

 

[ccirelli]

Taylor Jackson's YouTube channel has a recent vid or two about the AI culling system he uses. I have my morals & lines with AI technology (time-saving features like auto-masking in Lr is a game changer!) but culling my images... hell no. And I've gotten pretty fast (and ruthless) culling my own images, even for high-volume events.