The task I dreaded for years has turned into reality: the big cleanup of my Lightroom photo collection. But where do you start when there are 72,000 photos in your collection?
Rather than using some downtime during the recent Christmas break to venture out on photo shoots, I ended up reviewing and cleaning up my Lightroom photo collection. I have accumulated more than 22 years of pictures in my Lightroom catalog, totalling some 72,000 photos. I have realised for a while now that the day I had to do some serious culling would come, but having ordered a new computer (more on that in a separate blog post) I knew I couldn't hold off any longer.
Background
To be honest, the cleanup of my Lightroom photo collection had started a few weeks earlier when the 2TB disk space of my old PC was starting to burst at the seams. I had been getting some unpleasant warning messages about the lack of storage space, and this triggered me into action. First, I bought an external 4TB SSD knowing that (a) I needed more storage space than the 2TB I currently had; and (b) I needed an external drive for when I had to migrate my photo collection to the new computer. I do have an external hard disk for back ups, but that drive is slower than an SSD and is also only 2TB in size. The lazy solution would have been to copy all photos onto the new SSD, but I decided against that. I wanted to make a fresh start and have a cleaned up Lightroom collection ready when my new computer arrived.
But where to start? What criteria do you use when reviewing 72,000 photos? Do you just use brute force, or is there any logic to this madness?
Method and Process
Looking at my photo collection I identified two main categories of photos that I wanted to get rid off:
Near identical shots. When I do photo shoots I often come home with hundreds if not thousands of pictures. Many of these are virtually identical, for example photos of an airplane at an airshow taken at a high frame rate. Typically I kept all these shots, but I decided I don't need 50 shots of the same airplane in almost the exact same position. Just a couple - aiming for the best compositions and the sharpest of the lot - is sufficient for me.
Bad shots. These are the shots that are "bad" for a variety of reasons: not sharp, poor composition, poor lighting that can't be fixed in post-processing, low artistic or sentimental value, poor subject choice, etc. These are the photos that should have been deleted a long time ago but I never got to doing that. Perhaps because there is a highly subjective element to it and it's a broadly defined category. After all, what is the threshold for "low sentimental value" or "poor subject choice"? I decided to go on instinct and not spend too much time debating every single photo. My first impression made me "keep" or "delete" the photo. Also, I have gotten much better at this in recent years: whenever I upload new photos to Lightroom these days, I remove the bad shots after a first round of reviews.
Once I had an idea of what photos I wanted to get rid off, I set myself the task of reviewing one year of photos at a time. My Lightroom catalog is organised by year, and within each year I have separate folders for each of my photo shoots. Doing one year at a time, folder by folder, seemed achievable to me. And once I was done with a full year I would move the folder with photos of that year onto my external SSD.
Rather than deleting the photos straightaway, I first flagged them in Lightroom as "rejected". Once I was done reviewing and flagging all photos in a folder, I then filtered out all rejected photos to have a final look before hitting that Delete button. And when I say I deleted the photos I really mean I deleted the photos. I didn't just remove them from my Lightroom catalog, I deleted them from my hard disk as well. After all, I wanted to free up some disk space.
Distractions
Things would have been relatively straightforward, though still time-consuming, if there hadn't been any distractions along the way.
The biggest distraction was the urge to reprocess old photos that I hadn't touched in years.
My Lightroom and Photoshop skills have improved significantly over the years, so post-processing an old picture that hadn't been properly processed before was extremely tempting. Going down that rabbit hole can consume hours and hours though if you're not careful. While it's good fun and a nice distraction when reviewing a massive photo collection, I had to stop myself on numerous occasions and stay focussed on the review task at hand.
Another distraction was just the pure pleasure of watching all these photos. So many photos I hadn't looked at for years. Seeing all these photos brought back many memories. Memories of old times, places visited, friends and family, pets, events, and so much more. Before you know it you're lost in thoughts and you have to kick yourself back into gear to keep going with your review. Still, seeing so many old pictures was good for the soul.
End Result and Lessons Learned
So, what did I end up with? I culled my photo collection from 72,000 photos to 48,500 photos, which has taken me roughly 50 hours. It's still a large collection but I feel I have gotten rid of most of the photos I no longer wanted in my Lightroom catalog. There was clearly a large degree of subjective decision making happening along the way, so it's hard to give a universal set of rules that will apply to everyone. However, if you ever embark on a similar exercise you may want to consider the following:
Think about the criteria you want to apply before starting your review. What are the types of photos you want to get rid of? Or perhaps decide on the opposite: what are the photos you definitely want to keep and mark those up? Establishing some criteria upfront will make your catalog review an easier task. Instead of deliberating endlessly about what to do with every single photo you look at, you know what you're looking for based on some pre-established criteria. Once you have established your criteria be ruthless in applying them when going through your catalog.
Leverage Lightroom flags, colour labels, and ratings (or their equivalents in other software) to mark and filter out the keepers from the photos that are going to be deleted. You may in fact have already used these tools to rate or categorise your photos, so it may be as "simple" as deleting all 1-star or rejected photos.
If you have a large photo collection you need to acknowledge that the review is going to take some time, so try to break up the review in manageable chunks of work. Don't try to boil the ocean, just pick a year, a folder, a tag, a colour code, or whatever else you think is manageable and try to finish your review for that ring-fenced unit of work. Once you're done, pat yourself on the shoulder and do another chunk next time you're behind your computer.
Don't dwell on every single photo, especially the near duplicates: go with instinct and first impressions when you have to make inherently subjective decisions, especially when you have a very large collection of photos to go through. If you're not comfortable making the decision, just err on the side of caution and keep the picture. You can always come back to it later.
At this stage you might be thinking why would I do all this?
What is the point of cleaning up my photo collection? As the saying goes, storage is cheap. Why not keep all my photos?
There is validity to this argument. You can buy additional storage for not much money these days. I'm not here to say you "must" clean up your photo collection. It's a personal decision that is based on multiple and different reasons. For me it was important not only to have a smaller storage footprint, but to get rid of the dead wood. I really didn't need those 50 almost identical shots of an airplane or a bird on a branch. And I absolutely didn't need those unsharp or downright blurry pictures, those photos with highlights completely blown out, or other pictures with technical defects that I was never going to be able to fix in post-processing. I'm happy to know I have left what I consider the best images in my catalog for future processing and enjoyment.
I wish you best of luck if you decide to clean up your own photo collection!
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