I must wade through 1000's of images a year. While I am an amateur, I seem to work at photography more than some pros. (At least in volume and time spent, I never charge anything.) Since 2009 I have over 25K images on my zenfolio site. Consider that number is only a net percentage of all the shots actually taken and worked with, and the gross total quantity is a bit staggering.
I have used Lightroom since 2009 to do 99% of my post work. From viewing, sorting and processing, LR did the trick. But a few months ago, I started looking for and evaluating better software for the grueling first step: culling and sorting the images for keepers, rejects, etc. As most of you probably know, LR is excruciatingly slow at rendering the previews which literally adds hours of time to getting through the initial piles of images finding the best shots.
Without spending too much time on this post, I wanted to share a small program that I found which is very useful for this purpose and is currently being actively improved, developed and sold for a very low price. There are many available choices out there costing from Free to $150 or more, just to accomplish this task of faster culling. (I kept hoping Adobe would improve the Library module in Lightroom but after all these years, still nada.)
I tossed out a lot of apps fairly quickly because they usually focused on being viewers, not culling apps with the ability to efficiently do what I needed. Efficiency is key. The first app I really liked was Photo Mechanic 5. It's mature and well respected and it works great. But at $150, it costs more than Lightroom itself and I just couldn't justify spending that much money just to have faster image previews. Photo Mechanic's other huge benefit is very detailed Metadata manipulation which is great for sports photographers on a deadline but not something I really needed.
The current big winner that I wanted to share is FastRawViewer. http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ There is a 30 day eval and after that the program is only $15 for a license. Wow! After using it for a while, I have been very impressed with it. It supports rating by number and color, it can do standard editing, slideshow viewing, etc but I mainly use it for fast viewing/sorting. They have both Windows and Mac versions. The program is pretty mature at this point but they are still adding features. They also say that an Android version is in the works as well.
Give it a try if you have to slug through a ton of images like I do. It's very flexible and customizable. I changed/customized some of the keyboard shortcuts to match a few of the Lightroom shortcuts I use but otherwise, it's great as it is. The manual is also pretty well written and the forum seems to be pretty responsive.
If you try it, share your thoughts. For me it has worked great, FastRawViewer is hard to beat!
I have used Lightroom since 2009 to do 99% of my post work. From viewing, sorting and processing, LR did the trick. But a few months ago, I started looking for and evaluating better software for the grueling first step: culling and sorting the images for keepers, rejects, etc. As most of you probably know, LR is excruciatingly slow at rendering the previews which literally adds hours of time to getting through the initial piles of images finding the best shots.
Without spending too much time on this post, I wanted to share a small program that I found which is very useful for this purpose and is currently being actively improved, developed and sold for a very low price. There are many available choices out there costing from Free to $150 or more, just to accomplish this task of faster culling. (I kept hoping Adobe would improve the Library module in Lightroom but after all these years, still nada.)
I tossed out a lot of apps fairly quickly because they usually focused on being viewers, not culling apps with the ability to efficiently do what I needed. Efficiency is key. The first app I really liked was Photo Mechanic 5. It's mature and well respected and it works great. But at $150, it costs more than Lightroom itself and I just couldn't justify spending that much money just to have faster image previews. Photo Mechanic's other huge benefit is very detailed Metadata manipulation which is great for sports photographers on a deadline but not something I really needed.
The current big winner that I wanted to share is FastRawViewer. http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ There is a 30 day eval and after that the program is only $15 for a license. Wow! After using it for a while, I have been very impressed with it. It supports rating by number and color, it can do standard editing, slideshow viewing, etc but I mainly use it for fast viewing/sorting. They have both Windows and Mac versions. The program is pretty mature at this point but they are still adding features. They also say that an Android version is in the works as well.
Give it a try if you have to slug through a ton of images like I do. It's very flexible and customizable. I changed/customized some of the keyboard shortcuts to match a few of the Lightroom shortcuts I use but otherwise, it's great as it is. The manual is also pretty well written and the forum seems to be pretty responsive.
If you try it, share your thoughts. For me it has worked great, FastRawViewer is hard to beat!
