Culling Photos workflow

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Not a LR user, I use darktable, but I have thematic folders that are imported as catalogues in darktable, so far no issues with size. Thematic as in "birds" or "forrest" or "Iceland 2020" (I find my photos that way, propably the only one to do so). I also never cull them, so I have a back catalogue of almost all photos I took with digital cameras. Storage space is cheap, so why bother? The decent ones are backed up seperately so.

What I do so, is being picky with which ones I edit, so I do cull for that purpose. I do not spend a ton of time editing, the biggest time effort is usually sensor dust removal. No fancy stuff like maks or grad filters and so on. Not shooting 40+ MP definetely helps.

Overall, I do not like loosing data, be that bad images or pixels through in camera croping (looking at you, Nikon).
 
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This is a task for which I really like using the Cull feature of Capture One. They use a siamese image classification model to group similar photos so you can bounce and rate between groups of images very quickly. And if it is a portrait of a person it will have a separate area to zoom in on the eye for you to quickly see if the eyes are in focus.
 
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Nimi said:
Yup. I'm cursed with knowing my daily rate, I dont have any extra hours in the day, and culling becomes super expensive when I apply my rate to the culling process. So I don't. Storage is dirt cheap and backup is automatic and occurs overnight every night. My "working" portfolio is a fraction of all my photos. I actually don't even know how many I have.
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Thom Hogan says he does the same thing (keep every image). He says he sometimes goes back to try and analyze mistakes/missed opportunites to improve his technique - I certainly do some of that.

I'm in agreement that my time is worth much more than the ever-decreasing cost of storage, so I try to spend as little time culling/picking as possible (which is still way more than I'd like).

With my workflow, though, I can delete "bad" images (out of focus, etc.) as easily as marking them for "the Collection" as Nimi says. The majority of my "culling" time is spent determine which images are the "interesting" ones (1 star) - especially from a 20fps wildlife session, since there can be many similar images (which one is best?). I often delete one third to one half of the images from one of those sessions. Easily done, saves some space, but more importantly, saves me time if I go back to the full set at some point in the future - no need to look at those out of focus ones! Cheers!
 
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I go about this totally different. I download the card to the computer. I open the files in photomechanic. I tag the ones I want to keep. I import those into Lightroom. I delete everything else.
I can tag keepers in photomechanic quickly. I’m shooting a rugby match tonight and I’ll likely come back with 5-7k images (depending on the action) and can tag keepers in less than 15 minutes. Hold down the down arrow and watch your take like a movie. Stop and hit T for tag and that’s it. Super simple and fast.
 
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