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Best Option to Import Images for quickest review and culling

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CameraCarl

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I’m returning home from an extended photo vacation with some 11000 rather large images and face the daunting task of sorting through them and culling the bad images — and there will be a lot of bad images because many of the images are of birds in flight. When I return from a trip with far fewer images, I typically import my images into my Lightroom Classic v 10.2 building either “Standard” or “1:1” Previews. I haven’t tried the “Embedded and Sidecar” option. If I don’t mind how long it takes to import the images into LrC, but I do want to be able to move quickly through the images in the Library module, which Build Previews option should I use?
 
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If you have lots of BIF photos to check, you'll obviously need a 1:1 view, which tends to rule out building just Standard previews. So that leaves either 1:1 previews or the Embedded and Sidecar option. I now usually use the latter, as I take lots of aircraft pictures so have the same 1:1 viewing need, and the embedded previews are perfectly fine for checking focus. However, that also depends upon your camera, as not all cameras embed a full-size jpeg preview, so if your cameras do then embedded is certainly an option which I'd tend to go with.....it seems a bit of a waste to generate that number of 1:1 previews which get chucked away as soon as you start to edit the keepers.
 
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I've always taken a laptop with me when I travel for photography. This allowed me to cull daily and return with a fairly clean catalog. I now use mobile Lightroom and a iPadPro for that purpose. Something that you might want to consider for future trips.

Using the "travel" catalog approach, here's what I would recommend now: Create a separate catalog for just your 11,000 travel photos. Cull and process these separate from your Master catalog. Once you have eliminated all but the images that you want in your master catalog, use the "Import from another catalog" function to import your keeper travel catalog images into the Master catalog.
 
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If I were do have lots of photos to import on frequent basis, I would invest in one of the tools outside Lightroom. But several times a year I have to import and cull lots of images (like the triathlon I'm shooting on Sunday). So for those, I just bite the bullet and import and build 1:1 previews. I do a fast past deleting missed focus/blurred images and bad composition. Marking those as rejected and deleting. No need to see them again. Then I do a slower pass and mark by color the ones I think are keepers, like the best one in a burst. Those go into a collection (or a few) and get edited. If I find that the shot I selected from a sequence isn't as good as I thought, I'll go back to check the others I didn't mark. After the edits, if I'm happy, I sort by color and delete all the non-colored/marked images. Sounds brutal, but I wasn't good at deleting marginal images before and spent my COVID time going through old images in my catalog.

It sounds like a good trip if you had time to take that many images though. And I do second the comments about taking a laptop and culling on the trip. I don't bother with much editing, but I do cull and make a backup copy most evenings when on a trip.
 
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The wife and each take an iPad Pro and an Passport Wireless HDD on field trips. We copy all files to the iPad and to the Passport. We cull in the evenings during the trip and on the flight back home. So when we return home can import culled images into LrC. At home we have the horsepower, screen size, and all the apps and plugins to do editing work.

On return from last long trip I culled from 22,000 down to 7,000 on the flight from Doha back to Atlanta.
 
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I am a PhotoMechanic lover for just that purpose. I don't use most of PM's features, but I use the ingest, tag good ones, cull bad ones, and then drag the rest over to LR. (And I use it for all my photos, even the days I only shoot 100 or so..)
 
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