Rating, sorting, and culling 15,000 images

[tko]

Last week I went to the US National Taekwondo Open for a week as a media photography, came back with 15,000 RAW image, most of which are junk Because of the large number of photos I'm reevaluating my work flow from top to bottom. I've used the Adobe RAW converter to make 15,000 smaller size JPEGs for review.

What I would like to do is to use FPV to rate each JPEG, then delete or sort the JPEGs and RAWs, and delete all the "bad" ones. I'm only keeping the best of the best, under 10% of the files. I want to do this before I involve any bigger, fancier, and slower programs (do you know how long it takes to import 30,000 RAW + jpeg images into iDimager?)

Now, in the FPV quick help there is a cntrl-A for the "keep" folder. I vaguely remember you can send files to different folders based on rating? I can't find anything on the details in the help. If this was true it would lead to a quick solution.

So in summary, I want to rate, then sort and eventually delete based on rating at the lowest (i.e. fastest) level possible.

thoughts?

[Axel]

>send files to different folders [...] and eventually delete based on rating

Check out v1.1, in particular the new Batch File Processing plug-in: it can do just that and more.

More importantly, with FPV Pro there is no need to first export 15'000 JPEGs from your raws: just work directly on the raw files, rate them using the built-in XMP rating function, then use the batch file processor (F) to copy/move/delete (and export for web, if needed), according to the ratings you've set, as required by your workflow.

I bet you can complete your 15K culling job in 3 hours start-to-finish on a normal mid-or-upper range "2010" PC.

[Axel]

You could also use the new Batch Delete function to mark your "rejects" for deletion and quickly erase them all at once when you are done: press X to mark, then Ctrl+X to delete all marked photos (this function erases both the JPEG and the raw if you shoot in RAW+JPG mode, and can optionally move images to the Recycle Bin (slower) if desired).