Lea - I'm working on such a project now. I have over 500,000 photos of families in Honduras that I took in my 30 year career as a mission consultant. I'm scanning them all now and editing them in LR as I go along. The only way I've found to do it is to quickly and ruthlessly assign a rating of 1 to 5 to every photo. If you leave the Caps lock on, LR will advance to the next photo as soon as you assign a rating. Later, I will delete the 1's and add the 5's to my portfolio. 4's and 5's will be worked on in Photoshop and put on a hard drive I have dedicated to that purpose. I can't sit and agonize over what the rating will be. I am my own worst editor when I remember the circumstances of each photo and family so I just judge the quality of the photo and move on. It's very quick in LR. When I finish these 500,000, I will start on the 500,000 I have of Guatemalan families!! Hope this helps! Good luck. Tina On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Lea Murphy <lea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm curious how others may have handled a similar situation as I'm feeling totally overwhelmed with a project and am having a heck of a time figuring out how to g et it under control and manageable. > > I've created an enormous body of work photographing my niece Rachel, her younger brother Joshua and their baby sister, Edyn. Enormous to me is 70K+ images of just these three. > > These images are in a Lightroom catalog, key worded by name. > > My goal is to go through them, select the best of the best and print them in black and white on my Epson 3800. > > Eventually these images will end up with the children as a memento of their childhood. > > My dilemma is that I am totally overwhelmed with how to tackle this. > > I nose around in the images, pull out a good one, work it to the printable stage then run a print, catalog it and move on; it all feels very random with no real structure to the process. > > Has anyone else tackled such a project going backwards over time while still continuing to add work to the project on an at-least weekly basis? > > If so, how did you manage it? > > I sit down to my computer with an hour or two to spare for working on it and find I can't settle in and accomplish anything because I don't see a clear path through the project. > > Thoughts? Suggestions? > > I'm open to all. > > Lea > > > > > > your kids . my camera . we'll click > www.leamurphy.com > > > > > > -- Tina Manley, ASMP www.tinamanley.com