I've Got Hundreds of Photos on My Camera — Now What?

📸 About This Episode 

You’ve come home from a shoot with hundreds of photos on your camera — and no system for what to do next. This episode is that system. Seven practical steps you can follow in about thirty minutes after every shoot. By the end, your photos are safe, organised, selected, and improved. And you’ve learned something for next time. 

📋 The Seven Steps 

1.    Get the photos off your camera the same day — not tomorrow 

2.    Create a simple Category > Year > Location folder structure and use it every time 

3.    Do a ten-minute first cull — delete the obvious disasters 

4.    Pick your one best photo from the whole session 

5.    Back up before you go to bed — every single time 

6.    Edit your best photo properly — not everything 

7.    Write down one thing you would do differently next time 

📖 Read the Full Guide 

Everything is on the blog: rickmcevoyphotography.com/blog/post-shoot-photography-workflow 

🔗 Related Episodes 

Episode 46 — Step by Step Guide to How I Get the Photos Off My Camera Safely and Securely 

Episode 152 — How My One Photo Rule Will Help You Take Better Photos 

Episode 198 — How to Organise Digital Photos on Your Computer 

🎬 Next Episode 

Episode 233 — Are You Holding Your Camera Like a Cheese and Pickle Sandwich? — Friday 22 May 2026 

🌐 More From Rick 

Website, courses, resources and weekly email: rickmcevoyphotography.com 

YouTube: search Rick McEvoy 

Courses: rickmcevoyphotography.com/courses 

Resources: rickmcevoyphotography.com/resources 

 My brand new course Photography for Beginners: Sunrise in Mexico, will teach you exactly how to get out at sunrise and come back with photos you love  all told in plain English. it includes real footage of me photographing an actual sunrise in Mexico with an entry level camera. Find out more at rickmcevoyphotography.com/courses.

 If you want to start taking stunning sunrise photos, and why wouldn't you,  check out my Photography for Beginners: Sunrise in Mexico course at rickmcevoyphotography.com/courses.

Transcript

You have come home from a shoot with hundreds of photos on your camera. Now what? This episode gives you a complete post-shoot photography workflow — seven steps that answer that question completely.

Here is a situation I am willing to bet most of you have been in.

You go out. You take a lot of photos. You come home. You feel good about it. And then the photos sit on the camera for three days, a week, maybe longer. You mean to do something with them. You just haven’t got round to it yet.

And then you go out and take more photos. You get the idea.

Sound familiar?

The post-shoot workflow — what you do after you have taken the photos — is where most beginners have no system at all. And without a system, the photos either never come off the camera, or they end up somewhere on the computer with no organisation, no backup, and no real sense of which ones are any good.

This episode is that system. Seven steps. About thirty minutes after a shoot. By the end, your photos are safe, organised, selected, and improved. And you have learned something for next time.

Right. You’ve been out. You’ve taken photos. You’re home. Here is exactly what to do, in order, before the day is over.

1. Get the Photos Off Your Camera the Same Day You Take Them

Not tomorrow. Not when you get round to it. The same day.

The memory card in your camera is not a long-term storage solution. Cards fail. They get formatted accidentally. They get lost. The photos on that card are irreplaceable. Get them off the card and onto a device you trust as soon as you get home.

You do not need to do anything else with them today — you just need to get them somewhere safe. That is the first job.

Connect the camera to your computer, or use a card reader. Or insert the card into the card slot. Whatever. Copy the files. Done.

2. Create One Simple Folder Structure — and Use It Every Time

Before you copy the files, you need somewhere sensible to put them. Here is a folder structure that works and that you can maintain indefinitely.

Category. Year. Location. This is how I organise all the photos in my Lightroom catalogue from 2003 to today. Yes, it is that simple. This should not be complicated.

There are lots of ways you can search photos in Lightroom, so you don’t need anything fancy.

The beauty of this system is that you just add another year and you are good to go. I have been doing this for well over a decade and never thought about changing — it is so simple, which is one of the reasons why it works so well.

More on this in What Do I Do?

Set this up once. Use it every time. You will thank yourself repeatedly for the next ten years.

3. Do a First Cull in Ten Minutes — Delete the Obvious Disasters

Before you do anything else with the photos, spend ten minutes going through them and deleting the obvious disasters.

Not the ones you are unsure about. The obvious ones. The thumb that got in the way. The shot where the camera moved wildly. The accidental photo taken while the camera was still in your bag. The one where the subject had their eyes closed and it is completely unusable.

And any rubbish. Be brutally honest with yourself — rubbish is rubbish and always will be rubbish. And don’t be embarrassed — we all take rubbish photos. I still do!

Delete those. Now. Not because storage is expensive — it isn’t. But because keeping them wastes your time later. You do not need to review a completely unusable photo twice. Ten minutes now saves hours of confusion in the future.

4. Pick Your One Best Photo from the Whole Session

Once the disasters are gone, pick the best photo of each thing that you photographed.

One.

This feels difficult. That is the point. The discipline of choosing one forces you to look at your photos properly — to compare them, to think about what makes one better than another, to understand what worked.

And if you have only taken one photo you can skip this step. How utterly splendid!

And once you have done this, choose one photo out of all of them to edit. Just one. If you could only edit one photo, for whatever reason, which one would it be?

Fifty favourites teaches you nothing. One favourite teaches you a great deal. Flag it, star it, whatever your system allows. Use whatever you need to to get to that one photo.

5. Back Up Your Photos Before You Go to Bed — Every Single Time

After every shoot. Not occasionally. Every time.

The absolute minimum is one backup to an external hard drive. Better is two: an external drive and a cloud service. The photos live in three places — the original location, the external drive, and the cloud. That is robust backup.

I know this sounds excessive. I have been a professional photographer for twenty years. I have never lost photos because I back up consistently. Photographers who lose photos are the ones who had a system they did not always follow. Follow it every time.

6. Edit Your Best Photo First

Edit that one photo. Just that one photo. Spend time on it, as long as you want. Don’t overdo the editing — all you are trying to do is make that one best photo look the best that you can.

Then what? Stop and be happy. Or move on to the next photo and repeat the process. But only edit photos that you are going to do something with.

This is my approach to editing, no more than that. I should have captured a good enough photo of something interesting anyway, so that should be all that I need to do.

Editing isn’t making a great photo from a rubbish photo — it is about making the best photo you have the best it can be.

This is where beginners often go wrong. They either edit nothing, or they try to edit everything and end up exhausted and learning very little. Editing just one photo carefully teaches you more than editing thirty photos quickly.

What does this shot need? More light? Better contrast? Tonal adjustments? Colour enhancements? A small crop to improve the composition? Edit this photo properly, carefully and deliberately. Learn from every photo you edit.

Apply what you learn next time you are out shooting.

7. Write Down One Thing You Would Do Differently Next Time

One sentence. What would you change about today’s shoot?

The light was too harsh. The shutter speed was too slow for moving subjects. The composition of the third shot was not what I intended.

One thing. Write it down. This is where real learning happens. Not from editing the photos, but from reflecting honestly on the process. How utterly splendid it is that photography gives you this feedback loop after every single shoot — and most people never use it.

Quick Recap

1. Get the photos off the camera the same day — not tomorrow, the same day
2. Create a simple Category > Year > Location folder structure and use it every time‍
3. Ten-minute first cull: delete the obvious disasters now, not later
4. Pick your best photo from the whole session — just one
5. Back up before you go to bed — external drive, cloud, or both
6. Edit your best photo thoroughly — not everything
7. Write down one thing you would do differently next time

What If I Use a Phone To Take My Photos?

If you are shooting on a phone, steps one and five largely happen automatically. Your photos sync to iCloud or Google Photos in the background. Your phone backs up overnight on Wi-Fi without you thinking about it.

That is genuinely one of the great advantages of phone photography. But it also means most phone photographers have never had to think about these things — which is why the transition to a camera can feel more complicated than it actually is.

Steps three, four, six and seven apply equally to phone and camera. Cull your phone photos regularly. Pick your best ones. Edit them properly. Write down what you would improve. The discipline is the same regardless of the device.

What Do I Do?

I still take rubbish photos. And I delete them. I used to keep everything just in case. And do you know what? I never used one of those rubbish photos. And I have never, ever, regretted deleting a rubbish photo. I have never gone back and tried to retrieve a rubbish photo that I have taken.

So get over yourself, be honest and delete the rubbish immediately like I do.

And when I say take one photo, I mean one photo of one thing — not just one photo for the whole shoot. For a building, I will take one photo of the front of the building and move on. That is what I mean.

I told you my approach to editing, which is to take that great photo and make it look the best it can. That is what I am doing when I edit a photo. And no more.

The categories that I have are these:

• Import — this is where I import my photos to.‍
• Sort — I sort my photos in this folder before filing them — this is my first-pass brutal cull.‍
• Commercial‍
• England‍
• Worldwide‍
• Working‍
• Personal‍
• That is it. Two workflow folders, five main folders where my photos are filed.

My post-shoot routine has not changed significantly in years. Photos come off the card into Lightroom the same day. I do my first cull in Lightroom using the reject flag. Then I pick my selects — the photos that are genuinely worth working on.

For a day’s commercial shoot I might have two hundred photos. I will typically select ten to fifteen for detailed editing. For personal landscape work, I am often harsher — three to five from a full morning session is a good result. One to edit is my aim of course.

And yes, I keep a notebook. Not always a full sentence — sometimes just a reminder: try faster shutter speed next time. Use a lower angle. Check the background more carefully. Small notes. Big improvements over time.

Here’s Something for You to Do, Dear Listener

Sort your file structure out. What I use might not work for you. Here is an alternative that you might prefer.

Year > Month > Subject. For example: 2026 > 05 May > Countryside walk, or 2026 > 05 May > Garden.

Keep it simple. See what it feels like to have a system.

And let me know how it goes. You can text me from the podcast feed. I’d love to hear from you.

Related Episodes

The complete step-by-step guide to getting photos off your camera safely is in Episode 46 — Step by Step Guide to How I Get the Photos Off My Camera Safely and Securely.

For a comprehensive guide to organising your digital photo library on your computer, Episode 198 — How to Organise Digital Photos on Your Computer is exactly what you need.

And the one-photo rule that informs the approach to selecting your best shots is covered in Episode 152 — How My One Photo Rule Will Help You Take Better Photos.

Next Episode 💝

Next time, in Episode 233 — Are You Holding Your Camera Like a Cheese and Pickle Sandwich?, we are tackling something that directly affects the sharpness of every photo you take. Are you holding your camera properly? It sounds basic. It isn’t. And there’s a good chance you’re doing it like a cheese and pickle sandwich. I’ll see you in two weeks.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Photography Explained Podcast. 🤝 I do hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any questions 💁 or suggestions for a future episode, please let me know. 🙂

And if you did love this episode why not subscribe so you get every new episode straight to your listening device of choice.

For everything else — courses, resources, my weekly email and lots of other good stuff check out RickMcEvoyPhotography.com. And you can find me on YouTube by searching Rick McEvoy. And text me from the podcast feed – how utterly splendid.

This episode was brought to you by a cheese and pickle sandwich 🥪, consumed before settling into my homemade, acoustically cushioned recording emporium. 🎤

I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thanks again very much for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast, and for giving me 27-ish minutes of your valuable time. I reckon this episode will be about 23 minutes long after editing out the mistakes and other bad stuff.

Thanks for listening. Take care. Stay safe. Cheers from me, Rick!‍  

Want to go further with your photography?

I have two courses at rickmcevoyphotography.com/courses. If you want to turn your photography into a business, my real estate photography course takes you through everything — from the kit you actually need to delivering work clients will pay for, based on my 20 years of doing exactly that. And if you’re at the beginning of your photography journey, my beginner course was filmed on location in Mexico — real places, real light, real results. Not a studio. Not a grey background. The actual thing.

My resources page at rickmcevoyphotography.com/resources is worth a look too. I’ve pulled together the gear, software, and tools I actually use and recommend — and some of them will save you a lot of money compared to what most people assume they need to buy.