As a family photographer, I have amassed a large collection of 100,000+ and it’s getting harder and harder to maintain backups and feels like I’m hitting scale limits within Lightroom. I’m certain that 20%+ of my photos could be deleted and never missed. Short of going through them 1 by 1, there has to be an app that can help me find all the crap : blurry, eyes closed, poor exposure, etc.
Any ideas?
You could try AfterShoot - I used it to cull about 20000 images over the course of a week and it labels things that you can go back and review. Costs about $500 but might be worth it.
How would an AI know what you were focusing on? There might be a number of shots where the majority of people are slightly out of focus of have closed eyes but aren’t the subject of the shot along with the ones that the subject is blurred.
Let’s say you were taking photos of the family dog, and the people closer/farther away in the shot ended up out of focus, but the dog comes out great. How is the AI going to grade those shots? Of if you are taking a scenic shot of a building or vista and there’s people in the scene?
How would an AI know what you were taking the photo of?
There are AI-based tools that can automatically cull a large amount of bad photos.
What do you recommend?
Use aftershoot. You can set it to detect closed eyes, subject out of focus, and thresholds. I use it in spots photography because I shoot at 10fps and I have loads of photos to go through.
Honestly if you don’t want to do it yourself and don’t trust AI, use fiverr or similar outsourcing services to have someone do it for you.
You could do a trial run and give them a set of 100 pictures to sort through. Check their work to see if they’ve done an accurate job before engaging their services for a larger number of files.
Is there a good AI tool you’d recommend? I thought about outsourcing but the idea of random strangers going through my family photos seems creepy.
I tried Aftershoot for a bit when I was doing family shoots earlier this year. I didn’t stick with it but I found it useful for detecting closed eyes, missing focus etc. Not sure how well it would work with an existing Lightroom library but it has a free trial
I tried them in their early days and it was promising but still lacking. I should look into them again and see how it’s progressed. It’s also, if I recall more geared to formal photo shoots where you have a lot of images of the same thing and you need to pick the best. As opposed to “here’s 500 photos from my vacation, which ones are good?”
Yeah I found the grouping was useful but I also used it a lot at the time for very quickly eliminating obvious flaws. Agree that it can’t help as much with overall quality choices, and it was a slightly awkward fit for my workflow.