Feb 04 2022 8 mins
Neil sent me an email asking for help to sort through thousands of photos. He said he took a one week holiday to France with the family and ended up taking over 25,000 photos. He made the mistake of leaving his camera in burst mode. Now he has multiple photos of every photo he took on holiday.
He uses a Mac and Lightroom for editing. What is the best way to sort through a large amount of photos?
The quick & easy way to organize your holiday photos
Neil, if you don’t mind me saying mate, that’s a bucket load of photos for one holiday. All right. To sort through thousands of photos is easy to do, and here is how to do it.
I know you mentioned you have Adobe Lightroom but, for this instance, the best thing to do would be to cull your photos outside of Lightroom and then import the photos you want to edit into Lightroom.
Because if you were to import 25,000 photos into Lightroom in one go, it would take a very long time. Then you would need to work out which of your holiday photos you wanted to edit, which would be quite overwhelming because of so many photos in one area. Then of course, you should remove all the photos that you don’t plan on editing to free up space, and because of that it can get quite confusing.
I would recommend three things.
1. Set up a simple file structure to hold your photos for the purpose of culling and also editing.
2. Using an application called Photo Mechanic to cull your holiday photos
3. Import into Lightroom only the photos you want to edit.
Photo Mechanic is a photo browser. It’s used by professional photographers in sports photography or editorial photographers. It’s super fast to open photos at full screen, even raw files. It’s really really cool.
I’ve been using it for many years and I actually use it for small amounts of photos, not just for a large amount of photos.
I can go through 2,000 to 3,000 photos in 40 minutes to an hour from a wedding when I’m culling and I’ll go through 3 – 4 memory cards in one culling session, it’s super fast.
Downloading & Organizing your photos
It’s going to take a long time. Get yourself a beverage and make yourself comfortable. I would grab all your memory cards, have them ready because we’re going to create a simple file structure so you can separate your photos to make the process more manageable.
I should note that for the culling and organisation of photos, I’ve written an in-depth article that takes you step-by-step on how to do this. But for you, I’ll briefly go over it giving you the information you need to cull and organise your holiday photos.
How to cull your photos
How to organize your photos
Let’s start at the beginning.
* Create a folder called France 2016. * Within the France 2016 folder, create a folder for every memory card and label it; Card 1, Card 2 , Card 3, so on and so forth until you’ve gone through all your memory cards.
* Download one card to each corresponding folder until all your holiday photos are on your hard drive. * Next create a folder called selects.
The selects folder is going to hold the photos that you want to import into Lightroom and edit. Once your photos are in Lightroom and you have edited your holida...