Is there a way to do automatic batch surveys in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC?

Question

After I do the first culling, where I remove unusable pictures (unrecoverable bad exposure, lack of focus, etc) I like to use survey mode to choose the best pictures and avoid pictures that are too similar.

The only problem I have with survey mode so far is that I have to manually go down in the film strip and select which pictures I would like to survey. When culling 3 or 4 thousand pictures getting out of the keyboard and reaching for the mouse to to that selection, (Shift + Click) or even do that selection using the arrows can get really tiresome.

Is there a way to to automatic surveys in batch? Like, I set something like 10 pictures to survey, and after that Lightroom automagically selects the next 10 pictures for me to survey and so on?

Answer 1

Use LR's "Auto-Stack by Capture Time" feature (Photos/Stacking/Auto-Stack ...). This will group your images based on the amount of time between stacks, and you can adjust it for more or less time, until you get the right balance to collect most of your related images in a single stack.

In a perfect world, you could select a collapsed stack and view the images in survey view. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. You have to expand the stack and select the group of images in the filmstrip. To expand a collapsed stack, click the badge with the number of stacked images. Then select the group and click the Survey View icon.

Someone else might have a quicker workflow, but this eliminates the need of identifying the group of images manually, so it should speed up your selection process.