Culling photos fast

I use Geeqie for culling as well. If it’s a large shoot I’ll use Geeqie to mark the best images, then copy those to a different folder to work with in RawTherapee.

In shoots where the out-of-camera jpegs are good without the need to process in RT, but I shot only raw, I use Exiftool to extract the embedded jpegs from the raw files. Here are the commands I use. It’s very fast.

exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw -w .JPG -ext nef -r .

exiftool -tagsfromfile %d%f.NEF -r -ext JPG -overwrite_original -r .

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Not yet. But perhaps I find the time to port this functionality from ART to RT :wink:

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May be heresy here but I use non open source software for culling. :slight_smile: https://www.fastrawviewer.com/

It was very cheap to buy, so I just move the images I like off the SD card to my hard drive with it and then work on those in RT.

  • I get Raw+Jpeg from the camera.
  • I have a script that move the Raw to a subdirectory
  • I cull the pictures using the full-size jpeg
  • I run another script to mark the Raw that have become orphan.
  • Likewise I sort the survivors into subject directories using the JPEG, and then I run a 3rd script to find the matching raw and move them to the appropriate subdirectories.
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Is it a bash script? Can you share?

Very basic scripts with hard-coded Canon naming conventions… No warranty, etc…

My set up is that I have the JPGs in a directory, and the matching CR2s in a subdirectory called cr2. When I sort by subjects, the directories to which I move the JPG files are usually siblings of the directory where they have been kept together.

  • subcr2: the one with which everything starts. Creates a cr2 subdirectory and moves all the CR2s to it.

subcr2 (265 Bytes)

  • orphancr2: marks as “orphans” all the CR2s without a matching JPG (by renaming them), in other words all the CR2s that match a JPG that didn’t survive the culling. The script used to be more ballsy and erase the CR2 right out, but a bug in the script made it erase CR2s I should have kept (they were still on the card, phew). So now the final erase is a manual step.

orphancr2 (321 Bytes)

  • getcr2: searches the sibling directories for CR2s that match the argument JPGs, and puts them in a cr2 subdirectory. I use it after sorting the JPGs to various directories to reconcile them with their matching CR2. Code has been improved to retrieve only CR2s that are about as recent as the JPGs (an early version made a mess after the image counter rolled over).

getcr2 (523 Bytes)

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Hi @Ap0c552, I’m on GNU/Linux, I strongly recommend using geeqie for culling, particularly if you have thousands of images from an event and you need to deliver them in a few days.

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+1 on Geeqie. A bonus is it pairs the raw and JPEG files, and delete gets rid of both at once.

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I used Geeqie. I like it! Thanks!

I still wish rawtherapee was this fast…

I don’t really know what kind of magic are able to spell the developers, but following your concrete example and a bit of maths from the Rawpedia documentation, your 200 images could need around 100 GBytes (Gigabytes) to store them on memory, without taking into account all the background processes and applications running in your system.

If you’re happy with Geeqie, keep using it. But keep in mind that it works with the embedded jpeg present in raw files, and that’s why its much faster than RT.

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Ya it would definitely be an extreme feature that could use some thinking. But hey if you want to spend like $35000+ on a PC, you could get the new Mac Pro with 1.5tb memory and load like 2500 raw in memory in rawtherapee :stuck_out_tongue:

But more reasonably, I think rawtherapee could improve how it deals with displaying the embedded jpg (Inspector). As it stands, I am quite disappointed with the inspector.

You’ll need to provide concrete feed back about what you’d improve if you actually want to see improvement. “I think it could be better and I’m disappointed” doesn’t help.

If you’re talking about looking at bigger images rendered from the embedded jpeg, then you could try this:

  • go to Options>File Browser>Cache Options
  • change the Maximum thumbnail height to something like 700 (that would allow you to show images as big as 700 px height in the File Browser)
  • go to the File Browser and hide both side panels (shortcuts l and alt-l)
  • click several times the Increase thumbnail size button until you see the images big enough (in a 1920px wide display, that height means you will see a couple images, almost filling the display)

The render won’t be as good as a true demosaiced raw, but for culling images should be enough.

If that’s not what you’re talking about, as @paperdigits said, please explain what you need and what RT does that doesn’t fill your needs.

I tried large thumbnails, and they don’t cut it for culling images. 700px is not even large enough to confirm the image is even in focus.

I am curious if there is a geeqie alternative that supports both Linux and Windows…

nomads supports Linux and windows: https://nomacs.org/

sorry for the shameless plug, but it seems to me that ART might have what you are looking for.

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I can confirm that ART will get you much closer to what you want with its enhanced Inspect tool. The only feature I think it needs for better culling would be a side-by-side comparison feature so you can quickly compare two similar pictures and choose the best one.

Hello @europlatus

The only feature I think it needs for better culling would be a side-by-side comparison feature so you can quickly compare two similar pictures and choose the best one.

I agree!
This feature would be extremely useful indeed :wink:

At present, you can synchronize the pan - zoom of 2 similar pictures with Digikam or FastStone viewer [1].
It is not possible to do the same with RawTherapee and Darktable.

Btw, I have just tested nomacs. It is pretty fast on Windows 10.
Many thanks to @paperdigits for suggesting it :slight_smile:

[1] FastStone Image Viewer - Powerful and Intuitive Photo Viewer, Editor and Batch Converter

I am confused, what is ART? Is there a more informative homepage (github) that you can link me to?

Hello @Ap0c552

ART is a fork of RawTherapee, by Alberto Griggio.
Here some more information: