Don’t lose all your photos!

For amateurs like me, organizing is a lot easier if you realize that a main skill is honesty in what must be kept and what should never have been downloaded. I like birds and have many keepers of a species but ten are better than the rest and all I really should be saving. You have a great photo showing a bird with prey perfectly positioned in the mouth. To me, such photos make the thousand other pictures of that species eating totally worthless. Destroying all copies of very good, very sharp and very 'also ran' images, while painful, makes it easier to find those which we want to define our work. You mention many complicated steps to cataloging but none of them are as important as the skillful use of 'delete'. When we are gone, our legacy will not be judged by the terabyte.

I just wanted to give you a big thank you for all your wonderful content. I’m trying to jumpstart my love for birding and photography. Looking forward to your online course.

Simon.. you the mohn (man). Can't ever thank you enough for the inspiration and insights you've given to me and countless others on our photographic journeys. This is just what I need. Personally, I film and shoot so much more than I edit, print and share. This is just what I needed. Thank you!

Thank you so much Simon for sharing your experience and wisdom on this. Your professional setup has given me some ideas to incorporate into my amateur setup. What I find most useful in culling is to select for composition, action or personality first then going through those for sharpness and then choosing which to edit. So 2 passes before any edit and it’s not necessarily the sharpest images that get selected. I also find it helpful to leave the image for a day or two since editing can lead to loosing sight of what makes the image work for you.

Thanks Simon, great advice!!

Thanks for another great video, Simon. As a newbie, your tip about formatting cards instead of just erasing them was an eye-opener. Great work as usual.

I reorganized my LR catalog a few years ago,( recovering from a hip replacement), it was a mess and daunting. But I found using the Metadata search in LR a huge help. Setting up all the key words takes much longer, but easier after I did a massive cull. As I was guilty of keeping everything but the worse shots. I was culling similar to you but in April I started using Photo Mechanic 6. I find it helps clear my cards faster and I do my initial cull in PM6 and import my selects into LR. It's much quicker as I dont have to wait for LR to build the previews etc upon import. Like you I shoot a lot of birds and can have huge numbers of 50 mp images to cull thru. Thanks for all you do!

It's always very interesting to see how others organize their files and keep their backups. Great video! Thank you!

FYI, one of the most important features to take advantage of whenever you're using a NAS with more than two drives in a redundant array is called periodic "scrubbing". This means the system periodically scans all your files and detects and corrects errors using the redundancy built into they array. Otherwise you may find your files silently "corrupt" over time. Though I use a ZFS system which has it native, I believe QNAP and Synology both have a similar feature available. It was uncanny but a few years ago a few big content creators all around the same time found they had silent corruption across their backlog of media...definitely don't want that to be you

Some great advice in the video Simon, thanks! I just started getting serious with my photography hobby but luckily I've been recording music here since the year 2000. That has resulted in a rather massive buildup of powerful Mac computers some of which are in storage here. My main 2 areas are a MacBook M1 area that I mainly use for video and an iMac area for the main recording of guitars, keys, bass and such. All KRK audio monitors and subwoofer, Audient and Blacklion audio interfaces, and storage with mainly Sansdisk and Samsung SSD external drives plus Lacie HDD backups. I have Lightroom and Photoshop on both systems and my main video editor is Screenflow 10. I'm glad I already had all this "stuff" now that I'm getting serious with photography.

Excellent video. Many thanks I can confirm I bought a Synology DS920+ in February and found it amazing, at the moment I'm using 14tb Toshiba Hard Drives and have 3, use it for my photos and media files. Have a DAS as a primary storage with a separate hard drive for my photos only I can access my NAS from anywhere, recently visited the Lake District and copied all my files to the NAS. I can certainly recommend one

Culling is so important. I came to learn this a few months ago and have been going through my back catalog of 86,000+ photos and slowly culling them. Also getting better at culling new photos I shoot. One other thing I think is important is tagging photos. This way you can easily find all shots with umbrellas or hats, or shots with umbrellas and hats - I do street photography FWIW

Game changer! My workflow is chaotic. It works for me, but this could help my organization out big time. Always appreciate your work Simon🤙

Thanks! A lot of info here, I'll have to watch several times. As a former IT person specializing in data storage, you make me happy. The scientists I supported ~never~ backed anything up, and I would spend long, often unfruitful hours, trying to recover their lost files. As an amateur, I use Canon Digital Photo Professional 4, which is free. While it may not have all of the features that Lightroom has, it is adequate for my uses. I supplement with GIMP, which is also free.

Was just watching your two previous videos when this one went up. I wasn't expecting this much detail and it definitely gave me some really useful tips, thanks so much! 😄

Thanks Simon. It is great to see other practical examples of method that works for intended purposes - and clearly well. For me I usually think of things along events vs species and as such the folder structure by date in Lightroom is pretty good when supplemented with keywords and also using the catalog features and smart catalogs. I like to use the ‘export function’ to create sub folders that export a ‘frozen copy’ of the file for various purposes - a sub folder with jpg and a folder with jpg that is watermarked, a sub folder with high resolution tif. Essentially baking in the changes I had made in the original file into something that can then be used and is a much smaller file. I was surprised perhaps you did not mention associating your efforts with Smart catalogs in Lightroom which in combination with good key words can be very powerful to pull things together. Metadata as you show is very important and thanks for sharing your way to make sense of many terabytes of data! Video strategy is more challenging because they can get so darn big so fast. Many times for me we supplement photos with short videos and as such Lightroom can catalog them and we can put them in that same date oriented folder, using our program of choice like Final Cut Pro to pull in clips and turn Canon Log video into something we want to watch for short. But when video becomes the main focus that is a real change. Going to the next level is where my thought are focusing then to manage larger video related efforts -create content video that may have separate sound, multiple video inputs, photos. I also like Atomos and like Frame.io as a tool as well. Now that I am adding large storage to directly hold and work on the files is helping because you can reference very large files and relink them. I would be interested to hear more about your video efforts and choices. Clog3? H264. Raw? High speed? Time lapse? File management for video projects. These darn things get huge and redundant if we don’t figure out some good way to not have redundant files - i do of course know they can make reduced sized ones to work with and we can relink them when it is time to create the full video. As have fumbled around learning new tools I surely have created some really big files with Final Cut Pro as I have tried to figure out strategies that work efficiently. ==>Great channel and content, I really enjoy watching your videos.

Great video with super info. I was so glad to hear that you delete large numbers of photos from an outing. I really struggle to delete sharp images and keep only 1 or 2.

Excellent advice!

Incredible that you had this video ready to go during your time in Botswana!

Thank you Simon for pointing out this video, I thought I looked thoroughly enough through your work to find something like this... apparently not, sorry. Of course I watched it now and again you never disappoint, the info is massive and right to the point, thank you Master 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 also everything very clear... work for me to do 😊