Photography – Page 5 – David Bradley

Cleaning up a Least Weasel with Firefly

While we were standing on the ditch-bridge beyond the old, stilted Rothschild’s Bungalow at Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve trying to catch a glimpse of the Purple Emperors wheeling high above is in the oak trees, a mammal squeaked near our feet and poked its head out to see what all the fuss was about. It was a Least Weasel, it seems.

Its scientific name is Mustela nivalis, although it is often known as the Little Weasel, Common Weasel, or in some places simply a Weasel. In the US the term weasel is more generic and applies to a whole range of creatures. Not to be confused with Mustela erminea,that’s stoatally different although not weasily distinguished. Hahahah.

Anyway, as is the wont of these small carnivores, they might pop out into the open, as did this one, before quickly disappearing back into the tangled undergrowth. But, they almost always come back out within a second or two for another look as did this one, before it plopped into the ditch water swam the few feet across and could be heard scuffling on the other side before disappearing for good.

The upshot of all this peeking and scuffling is that I wasn’t quick enough to get the first shot of the creature standing on the bridge near our feet, but I got a sneaky shot of her after she made her second appearance. Unfortunately, there was a blade of blurry green grass right in front of her. I found a Photoshop tutorial on how to remove such distractions, but the techniques didn’t translate easily to PaintShopPro, although I had a go and managed to decolourise the blade so it was brown and slightly less distracting than the green.

I posted the image on Twitter to confirm the species but also to ask if anyone knew of a simple way to remove blurry blades of grass. Various people replied with PhotoShop suggesttions. But, like I say, I use PaintShopPro rather than that pricey Adobe subscription product. Twitter friend Chuck Baggett offered the best solution. A free, beta-testing AI tool from the very same Adobe, known as Firefly. It’s a generative art tool akin to Dall-E and MidJourney, AI apps I’ve discussed at length here previously.

Firefly has an object removal tool within its repertoire. You set an appropriate brush and simply paint over the object you want to remove. Chuck did the job for me on the version of the weasel, I’d tweeted. But, I obviously wanted to test the app myself, so I uploaded a JPG rendering of the DNG output I’d created with DxO PureRaw3 from the original camera RAW file. Set a brush up and painted out the green blade of grass and some of the other distracting fronds. There were some odd artefacts visible when viewing the eye close-up, but they were relatively easy to fix in PaintShopPro without having to start from scratch in the Firefly AI app.

Least Weasel photo before and after Firefly retouching

I can highly recommend Adobe Firefly for removing such problems from your photos. Much quicker and easier than the various approaches offered for PhotoShop. The app adds a watermark that declares the image was generated with an AI app, but I think in this case it’s quite fair of me to crop out that declaration given then I was simply manipulating my own photo with a digital brush! Obviously, the Firefly system can generate artwork from text descriptions just as Dall-E and MidJourney do and those generative images probably should be declared as such in some circumstances.

Boosting a shady Scarlet Tiger moth

I visited Chippenham Fen NNR. Hoping to see Purple Emperor and seeing a solitary White Admiral instead. Also saw the nationally rare, fenland Silver-barred moth, and lots of Scarlet Tiger moths. It was a grey day by the time I got a snap of a Scarlet Tiger nectaring (one of the only moths of this group in the UK that can feed as an adult). Of course, being a grey day, the light levels were low below a bank of trees with the favoured thistles.

High ISO (2500) photo processed with DxO PureRaw3 removes noise to equivalent of ISO 320 — DxO PureRaw3 can save you three full ISO stops of noise

As you can see from the left-hand portion of this photo, there was a lot of noise in the image. I used DxO PureRaw 3 (right-hand portion processed with the DeepPrimeXD AI setting) to cut the noise and do a little bit of sharpening to the image and then PaintShop Pro to adjust levels in this split-screen shot.

The photo was taken from about 3 metres away, closest I can get with that my big zoom lens, a Sigma OS 150-600mm lens fully extended on a Canon 7D mark ii. And, cropped from a pixel-width of 5472 to just the moth and some of the thistle, which gave me a 1590-pixel wide image, fine for the web and social media.

Camera settings used were shutterspeed 1/800s, f/6.3, and ISO 2500. I reckon PureRaw3 saves you about three full stops of ISO. So, the cleanup of this photo at ISO 2500 is giving you an image equivalent to what I would have got if I’d been able to get a correct exposure at ISO 320.

However, I felt that although the DxO AI software had done an incredible job on removing noise, as it always does, the photo could do with a different type of additional sharpening. So, I fed the original output from DxO into Topaz SharpenAI and then did my usual PaintShopPro tweaks on the saved filed from that software to get what I think is an even better final photo.

Topaz, DxO, PSP processed Scarlet Tiger — This Scarlet Tiger scrubbed up quite well with some RAW processing

How to make your hoverflies pop

I don’t often take photographs of hoverflies, first off, they rarely sit still long enough for me to get a shot. Anyway, I was trying to find butterflies* to photograph at Trumpington Meadows, near Cambridge, and bumped into one the university profs carrying a net. He was hoverflying. We had a good chat about insects.

I later shared my photo of a Pied Plumehorn hoverfly, which I’d snapped a little after we went our separate ways. He seemed to like the photo and asled me about my photographic equipment, he having gone from a Canon 60D dSLR to a mirrorless R5, and wondering about getting better results than he was.

Pied Plumehorn hoverfly, Pied Plumehorn, Volucella pellucens

Well, I’m still using a dSLR, a Canon 7D mark ii. On this occasion with a Canon 70-300 4-5.6 IS lens. I usually carry a Sigma 150-600 for birds and have a Tamron 1:1 90mm macro for studio shots of the morning’s moths and other subjects.

I have toyed with the idea of switching to mirrorless, but I only bought the 7Dii a couple of years ago and the expense of a new camera puts me off, especially, when I don’t think the equivalent price model can beat the 7Dii yet on various features and image quality, as well as in terms of weather and dust proofing. There is also the issue of staring at a screen through the viewfinder rather than seeing the image through the lens. Oh, and the delay between switching on and the camera being ready to shoot.

The 70-300mm lets me focus from about a metre away from the subjects, which is usually fine if you’re cautious with butterflies. The 600mm was a challenge as it has a 3m minimum focus and although it’s about the same weight as 70-300mm lens, it’s a lot shorter. The photos I’m getting when I can get close with the 300mm are better quality than my 600mm shots.

I generally use DxO PureRaw3 to denoise my photos and get them into jpg format for editing. It gives you about 3-4 stops of ISO in terms of noise reduction, which is amazing! I also use Topaz AI Sharpen, which is magic for some images at removing motion blur. I don’t always apply the Topaz processing

My final step is to use PaintShopPro as a cheap alternative to PhotoShop to adjust levels, saturation, vibrancy, and to do a final crop, resize if appropriate for social media and web, and then add my logo.

Below is the unprocessed copy of the hoverfly photo so you can see roughly how it came out of the camera…the edited version is only 1300 pixels across so would be printable at just a couple of centimetres across, it’s perfectly fine on a web page, instagram or for sharing by email. I recently wrote about my process as I apply it to butterfly photos.

My unedited photo of the hoverfly, just the RAW file saved as a JPG

Please note, my blog software is set to resize and compress photos so they’re all 768 pixels across rather than the native size.

*I saw a couple of dozen Meadow Brown, seven or eight Common Blue, a solitary Small Blue, just one Small Health, a couple of Burnet Companion and two or three Silver Y moths

Digital photography file formats

I often refer to the various file formats used in digital photography and image editing and thought some Sciencebase readers might be interested in a very brief summary of what those formats are about. Fundamentally, I shoot in RAW and process with DxO PureRaw 3 followed by Topaz Sharpen AI (not every time) and PaintShop Pro. The final images I share are usually resized to 2048 pixel-width, unless I’ve had to crop it to smaller than that, and compressed to 90% JPG quality.

You can think of RAW as being a digital film negative (although the colours are not inverted) and every other format is like a print from that negative.

Definitions and brief explanations:

1. RAW (Raw Image File):
  - Definition: RAW is a file format that captures all the data from the camera’s image sensor without any processing or compression. RAW files offer greater flexibility for post-processing and editing, allowing photographers to make precise adjustments without loss of quality. However, they usually require specialized software to view and edit.
2. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format):
  - Definition: TIFF is a flexible file format that supports lossless compression and is widely used for storing high-quality images. TIFF files are known for their versatility and ability to maintain image quality. TIFF files can store multiple layers, transparency, and high-bit-depth images, making them ideal for professional photographers and graphic designers. However, TIFF files tend to have larger file sizes compared to other formats.
3. JPG/JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group):
  - Definition: JPG/JPEG is a commonly used file format that uses lossy compression to reduce file size while maintaining acceptable image quality. JPG is a popular format for sharing and displaying photographs on the web and social media due to its small file size. It achieves compression by discarding some image data, which may result in a slight loss of quality. JPG files are widely supported by software, devices, and web browsers, making them suitable for online use. Successive editing and re-saving of JPG files leads to increasing loss of quality.
4. PNG (Portable Network Graphics):
  - Definition: PNG is a file format that supports lossless compression and is particularly well-suited for images with transparent backgrounds or sharp lines and text. Ideal for logos, icons, and graphics with sharp edges. Not so well suited for large photographs.
5. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format):
  - Definition: GIF is a file format these days primarily used for animated images or short looping videos. Originally, it was an efficient compression format for photographs that is in some ways lossless but limits the colour palette to 256-bits.
6. BMP (Bitmap):
  - Definition: BMP is a file format that stores images as uncompressed bitmaps, which means large file sizes. They offer excellent image quality and are often used in professional printing.

Sciencebase reader Andy, was puzzled as to why sometimes his edited image files in JPG format are bigger than the original RAW file. After all, JPG is a compressed format, he says, shouldn’t the file be smaller?

Well, the basic RAW file is like a 1:1 grid of every pixel value recorded by your camera’s sensor. It does contain some extra info too like camera settings, geotags, name, time-date stamp etc, and even a compressed jpg copy of the photo (that copy is used to display the image on your camera’s screen).

When you edit import and edit the RAW image, your processing, levels adjustment, white balance correction, sharpening etc, can add information about how you have changed the values for each of those pixels in the file. Now, when you save it, if you choose minimal jpg compression, then all that extra data is simply stored in the file so it gets bigger.

However, if you save the edited file with a higher compression ratio, then the compression process looks at the pixels, indeed whole areas of pixels to see how it can save space. Those pixels in an area with similar values, say an area of blue sky, are then compressed by saving the data for one typical pixel and then adding a snippet of code to say that so many nearby pixels are the same. This uses up a lot less space than keeping all the data for every single pixel. The redundant data is discarded. The higher the compression ratio the smaller the final file, but the lower the quality and the more artefacts, such as distortion and fringing.

Môn Mam Cymru – Ynys Môn, the Mother of Wales

TL:DR – Modern-day equivalent of the holiday snap slideshow a record of our most recent trip to Wales, specifically the Isle of Anglesey, Ynys Môn.

May 2023, we finally got around to visiting Anglesey (Ynys Môn, sometimes referred to as Môn Mam Cymru meaning “Môn, Mother of Wales”, for its agricultural productivity) just off north-west Wales (Cymru). We stayed in the seaside town of Rhosneigr right next to RAF Valley and with beach views of Snowdonia, Yr Wyddfa. Thankfully, we only really had airbase activity and noise on the last day of our week there. Although that in itself was fun to watch as trainee pilots did their thing.

Here are a few snaps from the trip in no particular order…

First thing we noticed aside from the fact that it was warm and sunny was an abundance of wildflowers in bloom at RSPB Conwy on our trip in, many of the species there had not yet bloomed when we departed Cambridgeshire. Oh, there was also the pleasant realisation that the evenings are long because we were that much further west than where we live.

Mrs Sciencebase running up Harrison Drive, Rhosneigr — Mrs Sciencebase running up that hill: Harrison Drive, Rhosneigr

We tried to visit as many places on the island as we could during our short stay including the rocky reserve behind Rhosneigr with its lakes, RSPB South Stack (for Chough, Puffin, Guillemot, Kittiwake, Razorbill, Fulmar, and Raven), Llyn Parc Mawr (for Red Squirrel) and Niwbwrch (Newborough), Cemlyn Bay for Arctic Tern, Sandwich Tern, Mediterranean Gull, a pair of Merganser, and Black-headed Gull. We missed seeing the Roseate Tern that had set up residence there though. We also took in the seaside resort of Beaumaris for a boat trip to Puffin Island (Puffin, Razorbill, Guillemot, Shag, Cormorant, Great Black-backed Gull, seals).

The Menai Suspension Bridge is one way on and off the island.

I know the numbers are irrelevant, really, but we saw at least 83 species of bird on this trip. We were chuffed to finally catch up with Chough and I think it’s the first time we’ve seen Raven in the UK. I think this is probably the most species we’ve “ticked” on a single trip in our six or so years of being a bit serious with the birding.

Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits — The Britannia Bridge is another connection between mainland Wales and the Isle of Anglesey

As you might have presumed I took a portable mothtrap and ran the LepiLED off a USB battery pack for a few hours after dusk for three or four nights of our visit. I had little success, but it’s been a weird year with low moth counts across the country. That coupled with the tiny, secluded courtyard of our holiday house with no nearby trees or other vegetation and chilly nights meant very few moths. There were a couple of Garden Carpet, several Carcina quercana, a few Light Brown Apple Moth, and Red/Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, or Xanthorhoe sp. Several female Adela reaumurella on plants adjacent to Llyn Parc Mawr.

Red/Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, or Xanthorhoe sp. — Red form of Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet to lepiLED in Rhosneigr

Looking towards Rhosneigr from RAF Valley

In daylight moth news, on the dunes adjacent to the airbase Mrs Sciencebase noticed Ruby Tiger (adult), I spotted a larva of the Six-spot Burnet, and numerous Grapholita lunulana.

Lots of Grapholita lunulana on the dunes adjacent to RAF Valley — Lots of Grapholita lunulana in the RAF Valley dunes

There were also Common Heath out there and a tiny micro moth which I didn’t ID. The Ruby Tiger moth was spotted ironically while we watched the training exercises of a pair of Beech T-6C Texan T1 – turboprops and a flock of BAe Systems Hawk 128 T.2 jet aircraft with not a Tiger Moth in sight.

Talk about loud – Three BAe Systems Hawk 128 T.2 coming into land at RAF Valley

Hawk trainer, RAF Valley — Hawk trainer, coming into land at RAF Valley

Beech T-6C Texan T1 - Prop aeroplane, trainer landing at RAF Valley — Beech trainer landing at RAF Valley

There were also lots of Wall butterflies on the railway cutting that runs through the golf course adjacent to the airbase and Small Copper butterflies, a pair of which I snapped in copulo. There were also Small Heath on the footpath through the golf course and the fly Rhagio scolopaceus, the Downlooker Snipefly, cavorting with the Wall on the railway tunnel wall. Elsewhere in the dunes, Fever-fly, Dilophus febrilis.

Wall butterfly showing cryptic camouflage of underwing

Small Coppers in copulo on the Anglesey golf course

Six-spot Burnet larva, Rhosneigr — Six-spot Burnet larva on the dunes near Rhosneigr

Fever-fly, Dilophus febrilis, in the Rhosneigr sand dunes

Male Orange Tip on Cuckooflower, Newborough

Red Squirrel, Llyn Parc Mawr — Red Squirrel on a sunflower feeder at the car park in Llyn Parc Mawr

Raven preying on Guillemot eggs at RSPB South Stack

Raven taking a Guillemot egg — …and the take

Raven with Kittiwake egg, RSPB South Stack

Puffins and Razorbills, RSPB South Stack

Chough flying across South Stack cliff face

One of numerous Chough, RSPB South Stack

One of hundreds if not thousands of Razorbill vying for space on the cliffs at South Stack with thousands of Guillemots, dozens of gulls, fulmar, and kittiwakes — One of hundreds of Razorbill on the cliffs at RSPB South Stack

In terms of flowers, there were lots of wildflowers in bloom that were not showing at home when we left. Also Sea Thrift (Armeria maritima), Bladder Campion (Silene vulgaris), Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis), Sheep’s Bit (Jasione montana), and Spathulate Fleawort, unique to South Stack and also known as the South Stack Fleawort, Tephroseris integrifolia subsp. maritima. At NT Plas Newydd, Bistort (Bistorta officinalis).

Sheep's Bit, Jasione montana — Sheep’s Bit, Jasione montana

Lots of Bistorta officinalis at NT Plas Newydd

Thrift in the foreground with South Stack Lighthouse in the background — Foreground Thrift over South Stack Lighthouse

The pastel houses of The West End (1869), Beaumaris, Anglesey — The pastel-painted, three-storey houses of The West End (1869), Beaumaris, Anglesey

Mrs Sciencebase on Beaumaris Pier — Mrs Sciencebase “promenading” on Beaumaris Pier

Snowdonia viewed beyond the rocky beach at Penmon and the Menai Strait. An artisanal gift shop in Beaumaris had the marvellous name Echo Beach

Female Great Spotted Woodpecker takes flight, NT Plas Newydd

On our way off Anglesey, we also visited National Trust Plas Newydd House and Garden and then once back on the mainland, NT Penrhyn Castle.

One additional wildlife point, an Orca was sighted off the Llyn Peninsula in Pwllheli Bay. A bit too far to twitch while we were in Wales. And one final word, a long one…

The station sign at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (The Church of St Mary in the hollow of the white hazel trees near the fierce whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio by the red cave)

Boosting your butterfly photos

TL:DR – Using photo editing tools to get the most out of your butterfly photos.

It is Green Hairstreak season. I’d heard that this tiny, shimmering green butterfly had been spotted on Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire in mid-April, so I headed out on foot to a local woodland patch that very day where the butterfly had been seen a couple of years ago. I was in luck! One specimen showing briefly. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a photograph on that visit.

Next bright, sunshiny day headed out with Mrs Sciencebase to take another look. There were none on the expected patch, but we kept at it and rounded a corner where there was a Dogwood thicket and various other bushes with a crowd of Green Longhorn moth! So I got a couple of snaps of those.

Mrs Sciencebase spotted the first Green Hairstreak landing. And so with a little bit of patience I managed to get a few overexposed snaps. Using a new second-hand lens (Canon EF 75-300mm lens, 1:4.5-5.6 L IS USM) on my Canon 7Dii), I’ve not quite got used to just how much light it lets in compared to the Sigma 150-600mm I’ve been using since January 2017). Anyway, once I realised the rookie mistake I was making (ISO too high), I homed in on the other Green HSs that were fleeting fluttering into my field of view and finally got a sharp shot at one sideways on. This shorter lens has a much more manageable minimum focusing distance of about one metre as opposed to the three metres of the Sigma.

Obviously, I shoot RAW so that I have more options for developing my photographs just as photographers did when developing their negatives. The tools are software rather than trays of chemical solutions and dark rooms with red lights. Nevertheless, they’re just the tools of the trade and the means by which one extracts a photo from the RAW file. I have outlined the process I generally use for processing my bird photographs. But, this butterfly warranted a slightly different approach.

First step after downloading to PC was to run it through DxO PureRaw 3. This software, which I’ve mentioned several times before, analyses the RAW meta data, identifies camera and lens combination and applies basic corrections such as removing vignetting and pincushion or other distortions inherent to your kit. It also gives you the choice to denoise the photo. It has a slick AI system built in, which I reckon knocks down the ISO equivalent by three stops. So, for a photo that starts of noisy (grainy) because the ISO is relatively high, you can get rid of a lot of the fuzz in one simple, automated step.

The output from PureRaw is a DNG file (a simulated RAW), so you can then import it into a photo editor with the corrections and denoising done and start as if it were the RAW file straight from the camera. This is a real boon as it lets you then do level adjustments, save blownout areas, adjust white balance etc. It also lets you open the file in Topaz Sharpen AI. So, with this butterfly, that’s what I did.

The Topaz software also has Denoise, but it was sharpening that I wanted with this photo. It can be done very subtly or you can retrieve details at quite a powerful level. My usual next step after such initial treatments of the RAW is then to open it in PaintShop Pro (a less expensive alternative to Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom). I am quite happy with its options for cropping, adjusting levels, white balance, saturation, and vibrancy. It is also relatively easy to remove distracting spots and specks in an image to clean up the final photo.

The adult Green Hairstreak, Callophrys rubi, usually emerge at the end of March, into April, to mate and are done by the end of June. They are obviously green, but their hairstreak is but a faint line on the underside of the wings and is even sometimes completely absent or at best a row of faint dots. The green colouration is, as with the colours of other butterflies, due to iridescence and diffraction of light by the scales on the wings rather than the presence of pigments. Lepidoptera, means scaly (or tiled) wings.

The genus part of the butterfly’s scientific name, Callophrys rubi, derives from a Greek word meaning “beautiful eyebrows”, while the species name rubi comes from Rubus, bramble, one of the species’ host plants. There are numerous other “hairstreak” butterflies.

Green Longhorn moth, Adele reamurella — Green Longhorn moth, Adela reaumurella

ChatGPT: Your personal brand manager

TL:DR – I prompted ChatGPT to write me a personal brand pitch.

—

I haven’t mentioned ChatGPT for a while. There has been something of a backlash against the hype and the scaremongering. But, I have still been using it for various small jobs, such as quick website tweaks and summarising documents that are TL:DR (too long, didn’t read). Latest prompt I gave it was to act as my personal brand manager and write me a pitch based on the Sciencebase homepage. This is an edited version of what it came up with:

David Bradley Science Writer

As a multi-award-winning freelance science writer with over three decades of experience, David Bradley has a unique talent for making complex scientific concepts accessible and engaging. He has written for a diverse range of outlets, including countless newspapers, magazines, research, industrial, educational, and academic organizations, and websites, covering a wide range of topics from astronomy to zoology and almost everything in between.

As a wannabe polymath, he is also an accomplished musician with an enormous passion for photography. He combines his science, snaps, and songs to create a website and blog that offers a fresh perspective on the natural world, showcasing his stunning wildlife photography, and sharing the latest cutting-edge research as well as occasionally offering incidental music. With his wife, Mrs Sciencebase, he is a keen allotmenteer, wildlife garden pond manager, and garden rewilding enthusiast.

David’s writing style is approachable and engaging, and he loves to sprinkle a little Geordie wit and charm into his work. He has bylines in New Scientist, Science, Nature, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Popular Science, American Scientist, and many others. In 1995, he set up the first-ever chemistry webzine, which morphed into the Sciencebase site in 1999.

If you’re looking for an experienced freelance science writer with a passion for making complex concepts accessible, look no further than David Bradley. Connect with him on social media, or shoot him an email at [email protected] to start a conversation…

How to organise your photos

UPDATE – I installed Adobe Photoshop Elements on William Gunn’s recommendation and set it to import my almost 200,000-strong photo archive (a quarter of a century of photography!) on my desktop PC while I carried on with normal work on a laptop. 24 hours later and it’s 93% done…so another few hours and I can open the organiser and hopefully begin to sort my photo archive. Fundamentally, those 200,000 photos are sitting in virtual shoeboxes in the packs they came in, some are labelled, many are not. It’s a nightmare to search for anything as it stands…

TL:DR – Organizing a collection of tens of thousands of digital photos can be a daunting task, but there are some steps you can take to make it easier and more efficient. Here’s a workflow that might work for you.

A simple photo organiser

Gather all your photos in one location: It is important to have all your photos in one place so that you can easily see what you have and begin organizing them. This might involve copying photos from various devices or external hard drives onto a single computer or cloud storage service.
Remove duplicates and unwanted photos: Go through your collection and delete any duplicates, blurry or out-of-focus photos, or images that you don’t want to keep.
Sort your photos by date: If you have photos with dates embedded in the metadata, you can sort them by date to create a chronological timeline of your images. This will help you easily find photos from a particular event or time period.
Tag your photos with keywords: Assigning descriptive keywords to your photos will make it easier to search for specific images later on. Keywords could include names of people or places, events, or even colors.
Create folders by topic: If you have photos that fit into specific categories or topics, create folders for each of them. For example, you might have folders for “family,” “travel,” “landscape,” “moths”, and so on. Be sure to move any photos that are currently in miscellaneous folders into their appropriate category folder.
Rename your files: If your photo filenames are uninformative or consist only of a camera-assigned number, consider renaming them to include more information. This could include the date, location, or a brief description of the photo.
Use software to assist with organizing: There are many software options available that can assist with organizing large photo collections. Some popular options include Adobe Lightroom, Google Photos, and Apple Photos. These programs allow you to tag photos, create albums, and search for images based on various criteria. That said, apparently the “organiser” component of Adobe Photoshop Elements is the way forward.
Back up your photos: Once you have organized your collection, be sure to back up your photos to an external hard drive or cloud storage service (I do both!) to protect them in case of computer failure or loss or ransomware attack.

The above workflow suggested by ChatGPT would be viable for a small collection of photos. Unfortunately, some of us have tens of thousands of photos, so at least some of the process needs to be automated, I asked ChatGPT to give me an idea on how to do that:

Removing duplicates and unwanted photos: There are many software options available that can help you identify and remove duplicate and unwanted photos automatically. For example, Duplicate Cleaner, VisiPics, and Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder are free software that can help you find and delete duplicate photos. I bought Duplicate Cleaner Pro to carry out this task.
Sorting photos by date: Most photo management software can automatically sort your photos by date. These programs can also help you filter photos based on date ranges or other metadata.
Tagging photos with keywords: Many photo management software programs can help you assign keywords to your photos automatically. For example, Google Photos can identify objects, people, and locations in your photos and suggest relevant tags as can Adobe Photosop Elements, I believe.
Creating folders by topic: You can use software to create folders and subfolders for your photos based on different criteria such as date, location, or metadata. For example, Adobe Lightroom allows you to create folders and subfolders based on keywords or other metadata.
Renaming your files: There are several batch file-renaming software options available that can help you rename your photo files in bulk. For example, Bulk Rename Utility is a free program that can rename files based on various criteria, including date and time, metadata, and sequential numbering.
Using software to assist with organizing: As mentioned earlier, photo management software such as Adobe Lightroom, Apple Photos, and Google Photos can help you automate many aspects of photo organization, including tagging, filtering, and creating albums.

Previously, I had asked ChatGPT to give me some ideas on useful photo organisation tools. William Gunn suggested the best non-cloud option is Adobe Photoshop Elements.

How to organise your photo collection

TL:DR – Long list of software that might help you organise a large collection of photos. But, William Gunn suggests simply turning to Adobe Elements to get the job done quickly and well.

I have tens of thousands of photos in my archives, some stretching as far back as the pre-digital era (working in and touring the US in 1988, touring Australia in 1989, southern Africa in 1992, and so much more in between, mostly prints, but lots of scans too). My first digital camera (an Agfa ePhoto 307, provided by Agfa itself in 1997). It had a VGA sensor (one third of a megapixel) and no screen. After that I progressed to pocket digital cameras, notably the Canon Ixus 500 and from there to the digital SLRs (Canon 20D to 6D to 7D mark ii. Before you ask, I’ve not gone mirrorless and don’t yet feel the urge to do so given some of its limitations.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I have tens of thousands of photos and fundamentally they’re not very well organised. So, with a prompt from a contact on Mastodon, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to help me organise my photos by asking it for software recommendations.

You are to act as an expert in software used by digital photographers. I need a list of the state-of-the-art applications in photo organisation. The software must be able to handle tens of thousands of photos and to be able to identify the dominant colours in them, to identify faces, and to identify the main object in the photograph. The software must be entirely free, no subscriptions, no freemium, no premium. It must work on Windows 10 and be intuitive and easy to use as well as very fast.

As an AI language model, I can provide you with a list of state-of-the-art photo organization software that meet your requirements. However, I must inform you that there is no free software that meets all of the features you mentioned. Some software may have a limited free version, but to unlock all the features, you may need to purchase a subscription or pay for a license. That being said, here are some options you could consider:

Google Photos – While not entirely free, Google Photos offers unlimited free storage for high-quality photos (up to 16 megapixels). It can handle tens of thousands of photos, and it can identify faces and objects in photographs. It is also intuitive and easy to use. However, it may not be able to identify dominant colors in photos.

Digikam – Digikam is a free and open-source photo management application that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It can identify faces and has some object recognition capabilities. However, it may not be able to identify dominant colors in photos.

XnView – XnView is a free image viewer and organizer that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some face detection capabilities but may not be as advanced as other software. It can also batch process images, making it useful for large photo collections.

Shotwell – Shotwell is a free and open-source photo organizer for Linux, but it also works on Windows. It can handle tens of thousands of photos and has some basic face detection capabilities. It also has some editing capabilities, such as cropping and color adjustment.

Darktable – Darktable is a free and open-source photo editing and management software that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some basic face detection capabilities and can identify some objects in photos. It also has advanced editing features like color correction and noise reduction.

FastStone Image Viewer – FastStone Image Viewer is a free image viewer and organizer that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some basic face detection capabilities and can batch process images. It may not be as advanced as other software but is fast and easy to use.

Windows Photos – Windows Photos is a built-in application on Windows 10 that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some basic photo editing capabilities, and it can organize photos by date and location. It may not have advanced features like face or object detection, but it can be a useful tool for basic photo organization.

Mylio – Mylio is a free photo organization software that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some basic face detection capabilities and can organize photos by date and location. It also has a syncing feature that allows you to access your photos on different devices.

Zoner Photo Studio – Zoner Photo Studio is a free photo organization and editing software that can handle tens of thousands of photos. It has some basic face detection capabilities and can organize photos by date and location. It also has advanced editing features like color correction and noise reduction.

Capture One – Offers advanced features for photo organization and editing, including automatic organization by color, subject, and face recognition.

Amazon Rekognition – Amazon Rekognition is a cloud-based image and video analysis tool that uses machine learning to identify objects, scenes, and faces in photos. It offers advanced face recognition capabilities and can identify emotions and facial attributes as well. However, it is not a standalone application and requires an internet connection to use.

Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services – Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services is a cloud-based collection of AI tools that includes a computer vision API for analyzing images. It offers advanced object and face recognition capabilities and can identify emotions and facial attributes as well. However, like the other options, it is not a standalone application and requires an internet connection to use.

Adobe Lightroom – Adobe Lightroom is a popular photo editing application that also offers some AI-based organization and search capabilities. It uses machine learning to automatically tag photos with keywords based on their content, including objects, scenes, and people. It can also search for photos based on keywords and location data. However, it is not a standalone tool and requires a subscription to use.

ON1 Photo RAW – ON1 Photo RAW is a photo editing application that offers some AI-based organization and search capabilities. It uses machine learning to automatically tag photos with keywords based on their content, including objects, scenes, and people. It can also search for photos based on keywords and location data. ON1 Photo RAW can be purchased as a standalone application or as part of a subscription bundle.

ACDSee – ACDSee is a photo editing and management application that offers some AI-based organization and search capabilities. It uses machine learning to automatically tag photos with keywords based on their content, including objects, scenes, and people. It can also search for photos based on keywords and location data. ACDSee can be purchased as a standalone application or as part of a subscription bundle.

I’ve looked at some of these tools. Digikam looks promising, especially as I don’t want to pay for a Lightroom subscription. But, none of them are quite as advanced as I was hoping. More to the point I cannot see a simple route from my disordered collection to any of them working to give me a tagged and categorised gallery. I shall ask ChatGPT if it can give me a workflow to do that. Maybe there is a way.

My approach to processing digital photos step-by-step

TL:DR – My step-by-step approach to processing my photos.

I recently discussed my photo processing workflow and gave a working example using a photo I got of a beautiful Short-eared Owl. I’ve now summarised that workflow into a step-by-step system for fellow photographers who might want to compare their approach and see if they can get better results with their photos.

Here are the basic steps I usually take with an image downloaded from the camera to give me a photo that’s ready for my blog or to share on social media. Fundamentally, you should be shooting RAW and using the RAW file from your camera.

Feed the RAW file to a denoise software like DxO PureRaw3 to remove noise and apply basic corrections. With my camera setup this is almost always a required step in low light. I reckon PureRaw steps you back about three stops of ISO without compromising clarity and detail, which can be very useful. Topaz Denoise AI or Sharpen AI work very well too.
Open the denoised image in your photo editor. I use PaintShop Pro, which is very much an inexpensive clone of Photoshop, but GIMP is good too. Adobe Lightroom might be a better alternative if you want a non-destructive editor.
Crop the image to the desired composition and make any basic adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. You can use masks to control which areas are adjusted rather than applying global changes.
Apply an unsharp mask to make the image crisper but always draw back a little from any automatic adjustments or settings the software offers. Use targeting or masking to sharpen specific areas if you wish.
Remove any distracting elements using smart cloning or object removal tools, but don’t overdo it, don’t over-edit, and don’t make your photo too artificial.
Save the final image to the appropriate size, compression level, and format for the intended output. As a rule-of-thumb an image destined for social media needn’t be more than 1024 pixels wide. Indeed, most sites resize and compress images that are not already optimised to a specific pixel-width and compression ratio (JPEGs)
Add your logo or watermark. I usually apply my “dB/” logo as a small, translucent mark in the bottom right of my photos rather than a distracting or image-covering stock photo type watermark.

I might add that all of the above is only really worth doing on a decent, well exposed image of good composition of an interesting subject, but that’s to be taken as read. The process can, however, rescue record shots that have not come out of the camera well because of low light or other problems. I saved a flying Peregrine photo that had a lot of motion blur by using Topaz Sharpen AI (motion blur correction).