How To Find Your Best Photos Fast In Lightroom Classic

You can use Lightroom Classic to find your best photos from a shoot. This is editing in the traditional sense of the word – deciding which photos are worth developing.

If you go out with your camera and shoot ten or twenty photos, then it’s an easy job to decide which ones to develop. You might even develop them all. You don’t have to spend much time thinking about it.

But it’s a different story when you take a hundreds of photos. Then you need a system to find the best ones.

I’m going to illustrate this using a recent shoot. I started with 439 photos – and edited them down to 32. Best of all, it took less than an hour.

A good editing system gives you the freedom to make lots of photos. Without one, it might take hours to find your best photos. With a system, it takes less than an hour. That’s the difference.

Find your best photos – before you start

Before you start the process of finding your best photos you need to get set up.

1. Import your photos into Lightroom Classic.

2. Create a Collection Set with an appropriate name for your shoot, and a Collection inside it called A.

3. Add your shoot photos into Collection A.

4. If you need to zoom into your photos to check fine detail, then go to Edit > Select All then Library > Previews Build 1:1 Previews. Do this ahead of time so you don’t have to wait.

Define your goals

Finding your best photos is the obvious goal. But what else would you like to achieve? This is my list for this shoot.

1. Find the best twenty to thirty photos to develop (I’m happy for it to be lower or higher than this range if that’s the way it works out).

2. Find photos I can convert to black and white.

3. Find photos I can experiment with in plugins like Exposure X and DxO FilmPack.

4. Find photos that work together in sets of three.

I’ve got my eye on each of these goals as I go through my photos.

Find your best photos – the first pass through

Now it’s time for the first pass through your photos. This is how you do it.

1. Click on the first photo and press F on the keyboard to enter full-screen mode.

2. Use these shortcuts to flag your favorite photos as picks:

Right/left arrow keys to move through your images.

P to flag a photo as a pick.

And that’s it. No star ratings, color labels, or flagging photos as rejects. This is a simple, binary system. Is a photo worth considering for development, or is it not?

Your aim here is to weed out the worse images. Mostly that’s photos that are out of focus or not as well composed as others.

These are my tips for making it work:

• First impressions count – is a photo sharp where it should be sharp, well lit and well composed? Don’t overthink it. If in doubt, flag the photo as a pick. You’ll refine the edit in the next stage.

• Don’t compare photos. You’ll do it in the next pass through.

• Don’t worry about how many photos you’ve flagged as picks. You’ll sort that out next.

• Don’t reject photos, or get sucked into giving star ratings. You’ll be there all day. Get this step done as quickly as you can.

Find your best photos – the second pass through

Now you’re ready for the second pass through.

1. Go to the Filter bar (press the ‘\’ key if it’s hidden), click Attribute, then the white flag icon (the one on the left). This displays all photos flagged as a pick and hides all unflagged photos. Go to Edit > Select All.

Tip: Make sure you haven’t inadvertently clicked the gray or black flag icons. Check the thumbnails in Grid View. If they all display a white flag, you’re good to go.

2. Right-click on the Collection Set you created and select Create Collection… from the menu. Call it B and check the Include selected photos box. Click the Create button.

Now you have a new Collection (B) with all the flagged photos from the first pass through in it. In my case, that’s 201 photos.

3. Go to the Filter bar and click None. This tells Lightroom to display all the photos in Collection B.

4. Go to Edit > Select All then press the ‘U’ key to remove the flags. That lets you start again with the selection process.

5. Now repeat the same process as you did in the first pass through, using the right/left arrow and P keys.

But this time you need to be more critical. Do you have groups of similar photos? Then pick the best and leave the others unflagged. Whittle your selection of photos right down.

Now’s the time to think about your goals. How do you feel when you look at a photo? Does it excite you? Does it make you want to jump into the Develop module? Which photos could you convert to black and white, if that’s your thing? Send to a plugin to get creative with?

Finding your best photos with Survey View and Compare View

One of the reasons I love Lightroom Classic for this is that it has the tools you need to compare similar photos. These are Survey View and Compare View. I use Survey View the most – so let me show you how it works.

1. Select the images you want to compare 

2. Use the ’N’ keyboard shortcut to enter Survey View. This is what it looks like:

3. Take a big picture view. Look at the composition and lighting. Which photos do you like best? Remove unwanted photos from the selection by moving the cursor over a photo and clicking the X in the bottom right-hand corner. In my case that left me with two photos.

4. Optional – if you need to, switch to Compare View (‘C’ keyboard shortcut) and zoom into two images simultaneously to check the focus or other detail.

5. Flag your favorite by clicking it and pressing the ‘P’ key.

Here’s an example of how I use Survey View, this time with eight photos.

When I have so many photos to look at, I click the first one, press the Space bar to go to Loupe View, then use the arrow keys to scroll through and look at the photos individually. When I’m ready I press ’N’ to return to Survey View.

Here I found three photos I liked less than the rest and clicked the X’s to remove them from the selection. That left me with five photos.

Removing photos makes it easier to compare the remaining images. I removed two more, leaving me with three.

I preferred the first two and flagged them as picks. They could work well together as a pair, possibly one in color and the other in black and white. When you see possibilities like this, include the photos in the selection.

By the way, I resist the urge to jump into the Develop module. I prefer to find the best photos first, then develop them. But you don’t have to do things the same way. It’s your editing process – do what feels right for you.

Find your best photos – the third pass through

How many photos have you flagged? If you need to refine your selection then create a new Collection called C and add your flagged photos. In my case I was now down to 53 images, which is better than 439, but still too many.

Start the process again in Collection C. Now it’s time to get super ruthless and select the photos you want to develop. These will go into a Collection called D.

Tip: With this system you can create as many Collections as you need. You might be able to stop at C, or even B if you start with fewer photos. Or if it’s a massive shoot, you might need a D or even an E Collection! It doesn’t matter how many Collections you need, as long as it helps you find your best photos.

Extra tip: Another advantage is that this system makes it easy to go back one stage and see if there’s any good photos you missed. If you’ve added your best photos to Collection D, for example, there’s no need to go to Collection A and look at every photo. Start with Collection C, which contains the best of your photos that didn’t make the final cut.

With this final pass through I came up with 32 flagged photos, which is manageable, and added them to Collection D.

Finding your best photos – the final steps

Now you’ve found your best photos, it’s time for the fun bit – developing them!

I suggest you create another Collection called something like “descriptive name [developed photos]” (in this case I used “Knightshayes [developed photos]”). Send your photos to this Collection after you’ve developed them.

This gives you an easy way to see which photos have been developed. Some photographers use color labels or star ratings. But it’s not as reliable as it’s easy to inadvertently change these metadata settings.

Another benefit is that you can sync the Collection of developed photos. This lets you view or develop those photos in another Lightroom app, or in Lightroom for web. You can use the photos in an Adobe Portfolio website, or turn them into a public gallery for sharing with friends and family.

I’d like to share a final thought about developing your photos. My philosophy is to get the basics right – tonal values, color, Clarity and any local adjustments (using masks).

But I’m not interested in perfecting the images. At this stage I’m too close to the photos to judge them properly. I prefer to come back in a week or two to finish them off.

That way I’m more objective. I can see better how photos might work together in sets, which ones will look great in black and white and which ones have the potential to be sent to plugins for some creative treatment.

Mastering Lightroom Classic: Book One – The Library Module

You can learn more about the Catalog, Collections and organizing photos in my best-selling ebook Mastering Lightroom Classic: Book One – The Library Module.