ACDSee workflow for choosing images to keep

A good ACDsee photo studio workflow eases the pain of cutting dozens, if not hundreds, of insect or wildlife photographs down to a few “keepers”. Here’s how I use it.

Because a live subject is constantly moving, one tends to take too many similar shots, “just in case”. There just isn’t time to examine each shot in the field to determine if you got all of the technicalities right, and the composition, and the pose. So one ends up taking extras and the problem becomes choosing the best photographs.

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I use ACDSee for practically my entire photo workflow, and only occasionally need to bring up another tool – usually when I’m doing a complicated composite. ACDSee has many tools to simplify the management of large numbers of images, and it’s not always clear which ones to use. My workflow is not set in stone, and probably varies depending on the subject matter, but here are the general steps I use to reduce a huge number of candidates down to a manageable number.

My downloads folder

Inside my main image library, I have a folder called “Downloads”. I import all images and videos to Downloads, and it’s the folder that opens when ACSDSee (my photo software of choice) starts up. I know that images in this folder have not been fully processed (weeded, rated, categorized, developed). Whenever I have some time, I work on the images here, with the ultimate goal of moving fully-catalogued, non-redundant images out to their permanent homes. I try to fully empty Downloads at least once a month, and fail quite frequently, because deleting photos bugs me.

And that line gives me an excuse to include some bug photos, because otherwise this post might get quite boring.

Backup

I set up the import to rename each image, add some meta data, and most importantly, to immediately backup to a separate hard drive in my computer. This is important because then I don’t have to agonize over deleting an image. I rarely need to restore, but I did recently after attempting to take pictures of the comet Neowise. I was sure my images did not include the comet, and deleted a bunch until I found a smudge that turned out to be a comet, so I retrieved the deleted ones for a second look!

First round tagging

Tagging, rather than deleting, allows me to take a quick second look. In Manage mode, with View | Second monitor on, I go through with one finger on the arrow key and another on backslash. I’m looking for the obvious here: poor focus, total misses (bird in flight) and so on. Then I set Filter | Tagged and take a second look. If one deserves a second chance, I untag it. Finally, I set Select | Tagged; delete and go back to Filter | All.

I should mention the Auto-Advance feature, which is fairly recent: 2020 or possibly 2019. With this selected, as soon as you tag an image, the next one comes up. However, if you don’t tag, you need to use the arrow key. I find sometimes I forget, and tag AND advance, so I miss one image. It’s easy to turn this feature on or off.

Getting more selective

Depending on the photo shoot, I may have reduced the initial set by 5% or 85%. One time I was trying to capture a bee in flight, and 85% were out of focus or out of frame! If there are still too many, I use a number of approaches, which still end up with tag, check and delete:

Looking closer

For the times when viewing on a 24″ monitor still doesn’t tell me whether the important parts are sharp, I used to select images, go to develop mode, and throw a rough crop on each one. Using arrow keys or “next” to go to the next frame doesn’t dismiss the crop tool while staying in develop mode. Then on the next Tagging pass, I’d have a larger image to examine.

When I was doing the wasp photos (which nearly all needed magnification before I could determine their quality), I discovered that in View mode there is a Zoom Lock button (bottom right-ish) which, well, locks the zoom. Previously I had been frustrated having to zoom in on each new image. So I think I will use view mode more now. And I want a zoom lock for Develop mode!

Eliminating near duplicate photos

Sometimes, near duplicates will all be together in the shoot. That makes it easy to tag and delete either by looking at larger thumbnails in manage mode, or flipping to and fro in view mode. For most precise work, I use compare images with up to four at a time. You can tag within Compare Images.

When I was photographing the dragonflies, I would stay at one spot for a while, then move on and later come back to the same location, because dragonflies tend to keep coming back to the same perch. Anyway, it meant I had near-dupes widely separated in the shoot sequence. Same with the wasp – the head-on shots were interspersed with profile shots, and so on.

My solution was to label similar shots with alt-2 or alt-3 and then filter by yellow or green to get similar shots together so I could delete some. For the dragonflies, similar shots might be: same background, same kind of dragonfly; same pose (side, front, behind). For the wasps, it was mainly similar poses.

Further developments

I always struggle with the issue of when to spend time in develop mode. Ideally, I would only take the time to develop an image that I was going to keep so I didn’t “waste” time on the others, but that’s not realistic. Sometimes you have to rinse a rock to see if it’s really a diamond, but you don’t want to spend time washing every stone you find!

One trick I use is to develop one of a set of images with similar lighting, and then copy the develop settings to all of the other similar ones. My only issue with this is that my first step in development is nearly always to use auto in Tone Curves, and then see how adding an “S” curve affects the image. In my experience, this is copied by capturing the exact points in the modified curve, rather than capturing the actions. That means that at some point one has to remember to go back and fine tune the Tone Curves of any images where the develop settings were initially just a copy. (New feature hint!) However, mostly this works well enough to allow further weeding out.

Rating images

I don’t do this consistently yet, but it seems to me that if I rated images as I went, and revised the rating if development made a drastic improvement, then at a later point I could do further rough weeding by looking at the lower ratings and arbitrarily deleting them. The issue here is that ratings are rather subjective. A cute, but not perfectly focussed photo of a grandchild might still get a 4 or 5, but after 15 years of photographing frogs in my pond, a “4” would need to be pretty darned perfect! Similarly, a bird photo rated 3 for technical reasons might still be saved because it’s the best picture I’ve ever managed of that species. So I might filter for 3’s and tag some of them, but not delete any until I looked at the whole shoot to ensure I had a “4” of the same or similar subject before deleting the “3”.

Final Few

At some point, I start doing a full-treatment development on the remaining images. How many I process and keep depends on my energy level, remaining patience, overall quality of the photo shoot and the final disposition of the photos. For instance, normally one wasp close-up per year would suffice, but as a number turned out OK, I kept more. Fairly decent family photos or vacation memories tend to get kept; pictures of common wildlife tend (these days) to be ruthlessly weeded. Pictures for a client may nearly all be saved with only technical failures deleted. Storage is cheap, but it’s probably a good idea to ask yourself why you are keeping 106 photos of a frog, regardless of how cute it is.

So here are some results, the wasp photos are the final 7, out of about 60. I’m still playing with the dragonflies, and I’m down to under 40 from 110.

Do you have a similar workflow for reducing your saved images to the very best? Or maybe you don’t care. I’d love to hear from you!

Wasp Gallery

Dragonfly Gallery