How to quickly tear through piles of photos?

[mattbell]

I'm starting to take a look at my volumes of photos from the trip. 

I have 11500 of them to go through.  I want to quickly find the best ones, make minor adjustments (cropping, rotating, brightness/color balance etc), and then add titles, descriptions, and tags.  It's got to be quick because I'm going to be doing it over and over and over and over again.

My ultimate goal is to have my photos as a big searchable database both on my desktop and online (flickr or equivalent).  I'm going to create a few slideshows for people to check out. 

I watched the demo videos of iPhoto '09, which appears to be a big jump over my current iphoto ('07), but I have to buy it as an $80 software package included in iLife.  Before I do that, I thought I'd put the call out to see what you photomongers recommend.  How does the newest version of Picasa compare?  Also, is there a better place than flickr at this point for navigating large photo collections online?

I also am planning a project of interesting photo pairs, showing two images from different parts of the world that either have a lot in common or provide interesting contrast.  I'll likely have to assemble the pairs somewhat more manually.

Comments

[sol3.livejournal.com]

It's pricier, but for a variety of reasons I actually far prefer lightroom over iPhoto - granted, it's been a few years since i've tried iPhoto against lightroom, but lightroom works really well with very large libraries of images (and allows you to do things like split your library over multiple drives so you can archive off large swaths of your photos but still have access to the metadata/thumbnails)

for large sets of photos online, i still haven't found anything i like better than flickr. zooomr had potential for a while, but lost me when they couldn't get their shit together. It's possible their shit is together now, though.

[danea.livejournal.com]

I'll second the Lightroom vote. I adore LR, though I can't compare it with many other robust image editing programs because this LR is the only one I've spent a significant amount of time in. There is a 30-day trial version you can use, and a ton of really useful tutorials and tips online.

And Flickr is actually really quite useful for dealing with large quantities of images, once you get in and work in the organization tools. It's not perfect, but I've not seen anything better. I haven't used Picasa on the account-holder side, but from the photo-viewer side, it drives me batty, and seems very photobucket-like in style.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

You might want to take a look at exiftool and ImageMagick. Both are open source command line tools. exiftool is useful for adding and removing metadata to/from photographs. ImageMagick is useful for batch processing of photos (resize, cropping, sharpening). If your photos are in RAW format, dcraw is a useful tool for manipulating RAW images.

The learning curve for the above tools is steep, but for as many photos as you have, it might be worth climbing.

I like Flickr for photo sharing. The only other service I've tried is SmugMug, which targets the professional market. However, I found SmugMug too sluggish and difficult to navigate relative to Flickr. I haven't tried Picasa, as I've been happy with Flickr.

For visual sorting, Adobe Lightroom seems to be the standard among pros. However, I haven't used it yet; as with most Adobe products, it's quite pricey. Here's a review of Lightroom's features:

http://www.jazzviolin.com/swf/lightroom/

I have found no decent open source photo manager.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

P.S. All of the above command line tools (exiftool, ImageMagick, dcraw) are robust, well-supported, long-lived, and widely used. You don't need to fear that they will be abandonware next year.

[funcrunch.livejournal.com]

I really like Adobe Lightroom - it's not free or cheap though.

I host my pro photos through SmugMug, which is also not free, but I feel it has a nicer user interface than Flickr.

[crotchgoblin.livejournal.com]

Lightroom for offline (it's so, so worth the cost, or find a student to buy it for you for $99, or liberate a serial number somewhere) flickr for online. Can't beat it. There's even a fantastic export to flickr plugin for LR that beats the hell out of uploadr, with a generous free trial period, followed by suggested donation. Totally worth it.

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr

There's a bit of a learning curve to lightroom, but again it's worth it. so, so worth it. And you're good with things that have learning curves. :)

Did you shoot in raw or jpg? I'm guessing jpg - lightroom's amazing for raw, but it's still pretty aces with jpg. Be aware that iPhoto has a habit of lightening pics a bit too much for my liking. I love how LR handles libs and hate how iPhoto does it.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

My camera doesn't let me record raw. I'm not sure how much less sexy that makes lightroom, but I'm going to play with the trial version anyway.

My pictures aren't going to survive being blown up to 16x20 but I knew that when I bought the camera. It will be more about the overall content than having a perfect image.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

The talk about learning curves reminds me of the time I learned Blender (3D animation tool... horribly complex and weird interface) so I could simulate the light paths in these arty mirror boxes I was building. That was fun. I quickly discovered that it was an inadequate simulation of reality, so I made the ray tracer do all kinds of things it wasn't supposed to.

[crotchgoblin.livejournal.com]

Helpful lr docs:

http://blogs.oreilly.com/lightroom/2008/01/shortcuts-you-must-memorize.html

http://photodealer.ru/lightroom/lightroom-hotkeys-2
http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Lightroom_Tutorial_Overview
http://www.jkost.com/pdf/lightroom/LR_QRDoc.pdf

[catithat.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried Lightroom, maybe I should. I've been using Photoshop Elements and I don't recommend it, it's too slow.

After a long trip I usually make a first-pass through the photos with Pixort (http://www.pixort.com/). You press a key 1-5 to sort the photos into your groups ("webpage bound", "archive but don't post", "delete"). It makes subfolders and moves the actual files into the new folders. Quickest thing I've seen.

I use smugmug for photos because I think it's prettier than Flickr. Not as good on the social-web front though (has all the features, but no one else has a smugmug account)