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Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

This would be great for DSLRs if integrated especially those who are shooting wildlife at high speed. Contrary to my own previous belief, I thought I would need a smaller hard drive in terms of storage space when I have a larger or faster SD card, but the opposite is true. The faster and bigger the SD card is the more photos I ended up shooting with more duplicates and the more of a need for a home NAS or bigger hard drive.. I think the issue is I never considered SD card as permanent storage media and I would always create a copy of it somewhere else.

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What you need is more aggressive culling. Eventually more storage space becomes a black hole for a photographer. Your photos go in- and never come out, because the sheer quantity is oppressive. Who wants to spend a Sunday flipping through a thousand tiny variants of the same picture?

If you are a talented professional who takes terabytes of unique & engaging photos, disregard- but otherwise, as another photographer, let me suggest you focus on culling instead of storage.

(Photo Mechanic was a godsend for culling; it's fast as blazes even on weak hardware, and cheaper than a new processor or more DRAM)

Yes, cull aggressively. Even talented amateur photogs that I know does not not have more than 10% keeper rate, at max, and that probably include a bunch of meh stuff too. No reason to keep the other 90% with half-nailed focus or unflattering facial expressions. For many years I kept mostly everything thinking that I one day might go back and re-evaluate a photo. That day has so far never happened in 16 years of shooting digital.

Yup, if I'm hitting 5/100 I'm having a pretty good day.

> you are a talented professional who takes terabytes of unique & engaging photos, disregard- but otherwise, as another photographer, let me suggest you focus on culling instead of storage.

Even among talented professionals, you are lucky if your "hit" rate creeps over 10-20%, especially outside of controlled studio lighting. I've always felt the amateur dream of "taking better pictures first time" ignores the reality that many pros have long shot in bulk and culled too.

I'd argue that the extremely un-glamorous secret to better photography for _most_ of us once a few basic composition rules like rule of thirds/golden ratio etc are understood is frankly to take many more photos, and yup, cull, cull, cull. This is precisely why tools like Adobe Lightroom come out of the box with such a heavy focus on keyboard shortcut support for zipping through an import and marking the winning images in a quick pass.

This got me thinking, but is there a photography solution for using ML to train selection if photos based on what you think is good/bad so that it can be automated based on your preference? i.e. Offline version of something like Google Photos so it can quickly scan through all the photos and you can keep improving the model based on your selection.

I can't agree more. I got my first "real" camera and it takes great pictures - when I frame a shot right, which is not too often. Otherwise I get a ton of data and don't have time to sift through it all in DarkTable.

p.s. I know DarkTable doesn't want to be a file manager, but it really needs to have Delete for this very use case.

Should be as simple as photo organisers/editors detecting and categorising bracketed or burst-shot photos and displaying them as a sort of batch of the same photograph, i.e. in a list of photos displaying them with one thumbnail and a visual indicator that multiple photos exist in that same thumbnail.

I stopped spending time culling a couple of years ago on the bet that in a few years machine learning will be pretty good at it. I’d rather cull when I’m generating training data.

Can I contact you on the training data idea?

Sorry, I don’t ever make off-forum contacts from forums unless with an account I’ve specifically created for that purpose.

> What you need is more aggressive culling

Or a good AI to help you categorize the pictures and look for features you may have not noticed.

Google Photos actually has some nice features in this regard: it flags the "best" picture in a burst, with remarkable accuracy in ignoring blurry photos, closed eyes, subject not centered, etc. And it generates nice collages and animations too!

But I wish it had a setting to clear out the ones that it's most confident are bad. If it's dark or I'm moving, there's a fair chance the picture will be blurry, so I (and everyone else) just take a few. Recognize that and let me cull automatically, please!

I noticed myself "making a panorama" the other day by just waving my camera around and taking a series of pictures and just assuming Google photos would choose to stitch them together (and it dutifully did without needing to be told). It's nice not having to explicitly choose what you want done up front and be able to trust it to recognize the most logical processing to do like that.

I'm sure it will also gain more ability to cull - I mean it already picks out things that looks like documents (e.g. from using the camera instead of a scanner), and offers to archive them for you. I'm sure they'll add more categorization as they gain sufficient confidence.

Can I reach out to you somehow @gascan ? Want to learn more.

See my profile, @gmail.com

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