I spent the day using Lightroom to curate the photos we took on our recent trip. One thing I always do is make a copy of all the photos on a separate drive so that I can go back and retrieve them if the need arises. I have never needed to do that, but the sense of security is comforting, especially if I am deleting photos from the Lightroom catalog and disk.

This exercise was time consuming and well worth it. I have never done it before right after a trip and I think that it will become SOP in the future. During the process I deleted bad or duplicate photos. As a matter of fact the number deleted was 775, 29% of the total. We have a habit of taking lots of extra pictures "just in case." Also there are photos we take getting the settings just right for our tripod pictures of ourselves.

The other purpose of the effort was to properly edit the keywords. For example, I managed to attach the keyword "Dancing" to three days worth of photos and this was a chance to set that right. Another issue to remove ambiguous keywords. This time I had "Sadie's by the Sea" and "Sadies by the Sea" which differ by only an apostrophe but can provide headaches later. Errant apostrophes are common for me. I use "Hawaii" not "Hawai'i" as it is properly spelled. It just keeps the keywords a lot cleaner. Another error I make is trying to attach keywords in the filmstrip at the bottom of the page. You can highlight a bunch of photos and try to apply a keyword, but only the selected photo of the bunch gets the keyword. You have to use grid view to apply keywords to a group of photos.

These are all things I know but in the heat of battle, sitting in the hotel in the evening processing the day's photos, my brain sometimes lets me down. Bottom line, I make quite a few changes to my photo database with the intent of constantly improving things. It is worth the effort in the long run.