Lightroom 1.x - Culling the Rejects

I often find myself returning home from a weekend away with several hundred shots, some are good (although not as many as I'd like), some are OK and some are rubbish.

Before I spend any time cataloging and properly "developing" the images I want to sort out the good, the bad and the downright ugly.  There are a number of ways that this can be achieved in Lightroom which include using ratings or simply deleting each bad one as you get to it.  I use the method outlined below because I find it quick, it gives me a chance to review my decision before I delete anything and lets me keep track of where I am so that if I get interrupted half way through I can come straight back to it another day.

Lightroom has a feature called Flags and each image can have one of three Flag Statuses which are, Unflagged (the default), Picked and Rejected.  So the idea is to quickly review each image and select as either a Pick or a Reject, if you can't decide leave it unflagged for the moment. 

To help with doing this Lightroom provides some filters and some shortcuts and I use them like this:

First I setup the workspace to show a nice big preview of the image, the filmstrip (so I can see what other images I've got, look for duplicates etc.) and the quick develop tools

Next I use the filter buttons to show only untagged images, this ensures that once an image is tagged either as  a Pick or a Reject it will disappear from view

Now I select the first image in the filmstrip and if it's blurred or an obvious Reject for some other reason I set the Reject Flag, there are a number of ways to do this, I prefer keyboard shortcuts as it makes it quicker so I use either the X key or CTRL+Down Arrow, message flashes on the screen to say that the image has been rejected and it disappears from view.  The focus automatically moves to the next image.  If this is a great shot and an obvious keeper I'll flag it as a Pick, the keys for this are P or CTRL+Up Arrow, again the image disappears from view and the focus moves to the next shot.

I may use the quick develop tools to make some rough tweaks to the image to help me decide but mostly if I'm not sure I leave the image unflagged for a second pass.  Once the obvious ones are done I may go back and use some of the other tools in Lightroom such as compare to help me choose the best of a number of similar images, the Reject and Pick shortcuts work in all the modules of Lightroom so you can tag them whenever you like.

Once I've gone through them all, I can quickly review those that have been marked as Rejects (by changing the filter) and then use CTRL+Backspace to delete all the Reject Photos, further Cataloging, Keywording and properly setting the Develop controls is something I only do for the Picks.  The unflagged, undecided images are there if I find I need them for any reason, I suspect that at some point in the future I may decide to delete those as well, perhaps if they've been around for a few months and I've not used them.