There! I am done processing my pictures from Iceland.

For the quick version: I have a full set of ~250 pictures here: Iceland 2025, and a smaller “highlights” set of 36 pictures here: Iceland 2025 Highlights.

I have also sorted pictures by day (there’s nothing more in the “day” albums than in the large album), to go with the individual blog posts. I’ve added a link at the bottom of each post to the album; if you want “travel commentary” to go with the pictures, that’s probably the way to go! For reference:

• Iceland − Day 1 (no extra album there!)
• Iceland – Day 2 – album
• Iceland – Day 3 – album
• Iceland – Day 4 – album
• Iceland – Day 5 – album
• Iceland – Day 6 – album
• Iceland – Day 7 – album
• Iceland – Day 8 – album
• Iceland – Day 9 – album
• Iceland – Day 10 – album
• Iceland – Day 11 – album
• Iceland – Day 12 – album

I spent more time than usual thinking about the way to cull and process all these pictures; I had roughly 1500 DSLR pictures, to which I wanted to add a few of the pictures taken with phones (mostly selfies!) This definitely required a vaguely more thoughtful approach than “just get everything into a folder and sort and process my favorites”, as it would have felt like a very heavy process – divide and conquer for the win!

I first imported all the pictures on my hard drive and into Lightroom; that’s pretty much a given, and that took a non-trivial amount of time (I suspect my card reader may not be the fastest.) Then, I put everything into collections. I tend to use keywords rather than collections; I do remember that I had a rationale for putting things into collections rather than keywords, but I don’t remember what it was 😅 My collections were place-based, AND numbered. I heavily used the GPS coordinates stored by my camera to make sure that I was putting the right pictures in the right collection, and with that I arrived at 39 sets of pictures. Of these, I had four sets that were more than 80 pictures (with a max at 108), and the rest was below 60 pictures, which felt generally more manageable.

I started by getting a single “best-of” picture for each of these sets (a few of these didn’t make the cut already), and I processed these first. Worst case, I had a good set of 36 pictures – yay.

Then, I went through all sets individually, culling pictures that were identical to another one, or not necessarily representative, or just plainly bland. I typically did 2-3 passes on larger sets to get a tighter selection. Once that was done, processing/editing − that’s a fairly standard process, and I got better/faster at it with AlphabeticalZürich. I’m not necessarily *good* at it objectively (I possibly edit too dark and/or too saturated), but it yields images that I like, which is the most important thing.

Finally, I uploaded pictures to “day” albums as I went through them. After processing a full day, I went back to the phone pictures, I added selfies and other phone pictures that required an addition to the album, and I continued to the next set. I also added all the pictures of the “day album” to the global album.

And that’s pretty much it!

Let me add a picture to this blog post so that I have a thumbnail when I share it: