Sunday morning. The Saturday memory cards in front of you, plus maybe the cards from your second shooter. Around 4,000 RAW files total. The couple wants a first preview by Friday — so you have five days for cull, edit, album pre-selection. You take a deep breath and think: "With the right workflow this is doable, with the wrong one a lost weekend."
For wedding pros that's just normal. The difference between a stress-free Sunday and a marathon isn't the hardware — it's the order you do things in.
What makes weddings different technically
Three things shape the wedding cull day:
RAW-only. Churches with mixed light, sunsets with hard contrasts, speeches in low light — every scene needs dynamic range that only RAW delivers. A wedding moment happens only once: if the exposure isn't perfect, the highlights and shadows come back only from the RAW. A JPEG has already thrown those reserves away — which is why it's off the table.
Volume. An 8–12-hour shoot day delivers 2,000–4,000 RAWs. Reportage style with burst mode can push that to 6,000.
Possibly two sources. With a second shooter that's not one pile but two — separate cards, separate timelines, same day.
At this volume, the embedded-JPEG trick saves hours (see RAW culling and the forgotten trick): if you re-render the RAW every time, you'll still be on the first third by Sunday evening.
Culling in three stages
Many experienced wedding pros work through the pile in clearly separated phases — not because it's more comfortable, but because each stage demands a different kind of focus.
Stage 1 — Rough cull (4,000 → ~2,500). Brain off, arrow keys hot. Eyes-closed, motion blur, duplicate bursts with identical composition — mark all as reject with X. Maximum one second per image. With FlashView and the embedded JPEG, this takes 30–45 minutes. With a Lightroom catalog and RAW rendering, more like two or three hours.
Stage 2 — Fine cull (2,500 → ~800). Brain on now. For each scene (ceremony, drinks reception, dance) mark the best version. Check focus, compare expressions, weigh composition. Stars 3–5 or P for pick — pick a system, stay consistent.
Stage 3 — Album selection (800 → ~80 for the album, ~300–500 for the gallery). Now the couple joins in. Everything up to here was preparation, so you don't have to present 4,000 images but 800 pre-sifted ones. More on this in the couple-feedback section below.
Pros with a few hundred weddings in their fingers often collapse the first two stages into one confident pass: straight to the best frame per scene, no intermediate stop — and land almost by themselves at a similar count every time, no matter how much came in. If you don't have that instinct yet, the separated stages are the safer bet. Both are legitimate; FlashView is the speed tool for the cull either way.
Two ways through the import
Before you start culling, there are two equivalent setups — a matter of taste, both work with the workflow above.
Option A — FlashView first, then Lightroom. Copy SD or CF Express cards to disk. Then FlashView straight on the folder, run stages 1 and 2. After that, filter by reject in FlashView and delete the rejected images directly from disk — Lightroom can't filter by stars at import, so the folder needs to be physically thinned. Only then Lightroom import on what's left. Lightroom builds previews for ~800 images instead of 4,000 — the lean route.
Option B — Lightroom import first, FlashView in parallel. If you have the reflex of starting every job with an LR import (from SD or CF Express), drop the files in the target folder and cull afterwards with FlashView on the same folder. Back in Lightroom: right-click on the folder → "Read Metadata from File". The FV ratings appear instantly, you continue straight into editing.
If you're optimizing for pure speed, A is lighter. If you have the import-first reflex, B works fine.
The 2nd-shooter merge in one step
The detail many overlook: two cards = two folders, same day. With FlashView you open both recursively with depth 0, sort by date — and see the complete timeline of both photographers in one flowing view. A ceremony shot from your perspective, a second later a detail shot from the second photographer — right next to each other.
The cumbersome way would be: two program windows, copying files together by hand, re-importing — and hoping no timestamp slipped. Here, one setup step and one view do it.
One prerequisite: the camera clocks have to be in sync from the start of the job — to within a second or two. Cameras drift, and not by a little: over a few weeks two bodies can easily run 20 seconds to a minute apart. Sounds like nothing, but it's enough to shift the timeline and file the second shooter's detail shot ahead of the scene it belongs to. So if you work with a second camera or a second shooter, sync the clocks once at the start.
Couple feedback without typing
Up front: not everyone involves the couple in the selection at all. Plenty of pros do the whole selection solo and only let the couple weigh in at the album stage — often enough with a "you decide, we trust you". Perfectly legitimate. But if you do want to involve them, the usual route has a friction point.
The usual route after stage 2: you upload a preview gallery, the couple looks through, sends you the list of favorites via WhatsApp ("Image 0034, 0067, 0089, 0102..."). You type the list into Lightroom by hand. Friction at every handoff.
With Nextcloud + StarRate this becomes a two-way street: the couple rates in the browser themselves, no account needed. Stars and picks land directly in the JPEG as XMP metadata. You then do the photographic pass on the same file — see their ratings, add your own. The overlap is the album selection. The full story is in the Nextcloud photo workflow article.
Two spots where time leaks
Staying entirely in Lightroom. If you run the whole job through LR, you pay a catalog tax — building previews, updating the index, every time. With 4,000 RAWs that's easily an hour of waiting before your first cull click. Smart Previews help with culling but cost storage — and do nothing about the sluggish catalog itself. Pulling the cull out of LR saves you that hour — and in LR you later only see what's been sorted.
Sorting hard too late. If you hesitate in the rough cull, you just push the decision into stage 2 or 3 — where it costs more time per image, because the whole undecided set runs through again every time. The time you save in stage 1, you save again in stage 2.
What do you use when?
Briefly:
- FlashView for stages 1 and 2 — speed at 4,000 RAWs, 2nd-shooter merge in one step, ready to start without import.
- StarRate for stage 3 and couple feedback, if you run Nextcloud. Picks land directly in the JPEG, Lightroom reads them with "Read Metadata from File".
- Lightroom after the cull. Editing, retouch, export. Better to handle the cull itself before — see catalog tax above.
What's left
Sunday morning again, in front of the cards. With the split workflow, Friday delivery isn't a struggle but routine. Three stages, two specialized tools, one clearly separated editing step. And your weekend is yours again — Sunday included.
If you'd like to try FlashView for that, it's at flashview.net.
