Culling photos

[Archibald]

I need a better way to cull photos. Generally I come back from a shoot with a few hundred shots. I want to get rid of the out of focus ones, and select the best of near-dupes.

I used to use Lightroom Classic for that, but it has become VERY slow on my laptop. It takes many seconds just to advance to the next pic. LrC is great on my desktop, but not on the laptop. And I rely on the laptop when on trips. The laptop is a 2-year-old Dell Inspiron running Win11.

Buying a new laptop with a top GPU is expensive and the device will be heavy. And I'm not sure how much time it would actually save.

So the solution I'm looking for is a program/app that can do preliminary culling for me. This app has to be free or cheap, because I'm already paying for the Adobe plan. I don't want to replace LrC, I want something simple to screen RAWs before importing into LrC. That eliminates Photo Mechanic because it is very expensive.

Programs that come to mind are Adobe Bridge, Irfanview, and Faststone. I think the latter two will probably work but I have not tested them for culling. Bridge is touted by many, but for now looks way too inscrutable. Maybe that conclusion is too hasty. There could be other programs too that I don't know about.

I would appreciate your suggestions for doing faster culling.

 

[gossamer88]

A wedding photographer I followed on YouTube uses Narrative Select:

AI Photo Culling Software for Photographers | Narrative

Narrative: culling software for photographers. Cull & edit quickly with AI assistance & creative control. Integrates with Lightroom.

narrative.so

 

[3Rotor]

Bridge has been part of my workflow for over a decade now. It really is not overly complex once you get acclimated to it. Being able to hop into ACR is a huge benefit to me without having to launch PS or Lightroom. Plus, you already have it with your subscription.

 

[ShipleyNW]

I use DPP as my first-cull software. I only put those first cull keepers into LRC.

I played with Faststone and Fast Raw Viewer for a few months each before settling on DPP. They're all free so you can try them to see which plays best on your laptop hardware. I don't remember any performance problems with any of them, but I've only run them on my main editing desktop.

 

[Archibald]

A wedding photographer I followed on YouTube uses Narrative Select:

AI Photo Culling Software for Photographers | Narrative

Narrative: culling software for photographers. Cull & edit quickly with AI assistance & creative control. Integrates with Lightroom.

narrative.so

Looks neat, but the Standard version is $20/mo, more than I pay for the Adobe subscription. The "Get Narrative for free" line is dishonest. Not your fault though - thanks.

 

[Archibald]

Bridge has been part of my workflow for over a decade now. It really is not overly complex once you get acclimated to it. Being able to hop into ACR is a huge benefit to me without having to launch PS or Lightroom. Plus, you already have it with your subscription.

I better give Bridge another try. I have followed a couple of website that give instructions. Those sites are very frustrating because they oversimplify to make it easy. The result is that their instructions don't work.

There are quite a few other mysteries in Bridge having to do with keywords and ratings and such, and whether those settings are communicated to LR. Look like I can't zoom but I can apply a magnifier. Big learning curve.

 

[Archibald]

I use DPP as my first-cull software. I only put those first cull keepers into LRC.

I played with Faststone and Fast Raw Viewer for a few months each before settling on DPP. They're all free so you can try them to see which plays best on your laptop hardware. I don't remember any performance problems with any of them, but I've only run them on my main editing desktop.

Good suggestion. I keep forgetting about DPP. Once in a rare while I do use it, and always forget how to advance to the next pic, because it's not obvious, and different from other programs. That is off-putting, spending time figuring out how to move quickly through the collection. I better put a sticky note on the monitor on how to do this.

 

[davidedric]

For rough culling, as you describe, I'd go with FastStone

 

[ShipleyNW]

always forget how to advance to the next pic

Select a bunch of images in a folder you want to run through a cull (in our case all of them), open them in the Quick Check window, then use the arrow keys to navigate.

I've got a Loupedeck console. I've got button and a knob programed to do exactly that because I could never remember how to get to the cull window. That first cull is pretty much the only thing I use DPP for.

Keep in mind that if you click a rating button or something, you have to go back to the film strip and click the image you were on before the arrow keys work again for navigation.

 

[Jan1977]

When I have to cull a lot, I use Fast Raw Viewer, paid once for it and can use it on both my PC and laptop. For about 20 EUR, being one time, I consider it cheap. I think I am using it for at least over 2 years now.

It loads RAWs pretty fast for culling and also has some overlay features (you can toggle on of) to show sharpness for example. But I do not really use that. You can also move non-selects to a "rejected" subfolder from where you can delete further. I use the stars to cull, select the non-starred and move them to rejected. I import the photos that are not moved to the rejected folder into LR and edit. I often keep the rejected folder till I am done editing the set. Just in case I notice something during my edits, which may me want to go back to see if there were other shots of that sequence.

 

[rikkflohr]

Have you seen this sneak from Adobe regarding upcoming Culling tools?

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[Archibald]

I tried Fast Raw Viewer and didn't like it.

FRV has focus peaking abilities. Potentially, this is its most useful feature for me, because focus is an issue in the kind of photography I do.

However, I found this feature to be useless with noisy images because it interprets noise as sharp parts of the image. For less noisy images, I found it was not able to discriminate sufficiently to show me where the in-focus areas are.

Here is an example. My eye tells me that focus was on a part of the tree trunk behind the bird. I can ask FRV to show parts of the image with Detail, and also Edge sharpness.

As-is image


Focus peaking activated, showing Detail. Red areas indicate sharpness. But there is red on the bird which is not in focus, and even on the OOF background to the left of the tree trunk.

 

[Archibald]

This is FRV showing edge detail (in green) on the same picture. In this case it seems to be trying, with the most intense green on the grass at the base of the tree. But IMO there is too much green on the out-of-focus bird and other areas for this to be a quick tool for showing focus.

 

[Archibald]

Have you seen this sneak from Adobe regarding upcoming Culling tools?

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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

Culling using AI sounds very interesting. But AI needs intense computer power. This will work great on my desktop, which has the Nvidia 4070, but not the laptop.

 

[Michael456]

FastStone works really well for reasonably fast culling, IMO.
Switching between images with the cursor keys is pretty fast and you can switch to 100% view by pressing and holding the left mouse button. I simply tag any photos I want to delete later by pressing "Q". When I'm done browsing through the photos I turn the filter on to show only the tagged photos (Shift+Q) and then delete them all.

 

[Archibald]

FastStone works really well for reasonably fast culling, IMO.
Switching between images with the cursor keys is pretty fast and you can switch to 100% view by pressing and holding the left mouse button. I simply tag any photos I want to delete later by pressing "Q". When I'm done browsing through the photos I turn the filter on to show only the tagged photos (Shift+Q) and then delete them all.

Yes, I agree. I wish there were a way to advance to the next pic while viewing at 100%.

 

[MSH411]

Good suggestion. I keep forgetting about DPP. Once in a rare while I do use it, and always forget how to advance to the next pic, because it's not obvious, and different from other programs. That is off-putting, spending time figuring out how to move quickly through the collection. I better put a sticky note on the monitor on how to do this.

Like you it took me a while to land on a good tool for culling Archibald but DPP is all I use now. I create folders for each shoot and move everything from the SD to the folder, open it in DPP and basically use the down arrow and delete keys. I have a filmstrip view on the left and a larger image on the right (50% view on my 27" monitor). Being able to view my focus point is a bonus.

The only thing that frustrates me a bit is that there is a bit of a delay for the image to load totally. It looks like it's loaded, it's a bit soft and then the image pops and is fully loaded. It a bit strange because me computer, running windows is a beast, I wouldn't expect any delay. Also by default I have set my music folder as the default when opening DPP. If you select a folder with images it will load them all before allowing you to start your workflow. Easy work around and DPP opens quickly pointed at a folder with zero pictures.

 

[Archibald]

@MSH411 - thanks for the tips re DPP. I need to get back to it. Interesting that you mention some of its quirks. Those oddities put people off. DPP is very capable but people don't like it. I don't know why Canon doesn't make it a more intuitive program. Maybe Adobe pays Canon to keep DPP quirky.

 

[MSH411]

@MSH411 I don't know why Canon doesn't make it a more intuitive program. Maybe Adobe pays Canon to keep DPP quirky.

LOL.....

Well we all know software and firmware aren't a Canon strength but their bodies and lenses make up for it.

 

[slpollett]

When my LR started slowing down on my, the culprit was my catalog had gotten huge and my external storage drive for images was getting about 75% full. I switched to a new drive and that helped a lot, but I was working on clearing out the oldest images from the catalog. That also helped. I ended up needing a new computer for different reasons, but that also helped. Good luck.