Couple of points that I started to make but neglected to finish.

Every now and then I'll do a manual purge where I'll filter only on "unflagged" photos and delete them from the disk and catalog.

With my recent hard drive failure, I've often wondered over the years whether its really worth having raid. And this single event has dispelled any doubt I've had. Yes, all my data is backed up, so there's very little, if any, that I would've lost. But despite the cost of buying 4 new 12TB disks (yes, I could've got away with replacing just the one) and the time it took to rebuild (almost a week, as I added the disks one at a time, and rebuild the entire array each time), it was still a lot less painful that restoring everything from backup.

You're absolutely right. The correct way to handle this would have been not to wait for a disk to fail and then suddenly find yourself with all old disks after 12 years. Instead, it would be to replace just one disk at a time every 2-3 years, depending on its operating hours.

Have you ever tried cataloging videos with Lightroom?

There are so many photos that you don't linger over when you look through them a second time.

Since wildlife photography, especially BIF, produces a lot of rejects, but also diving, my workflow is as follows: First, mark what might be okay on the camera and delete the rest. Then import them into Lightroom and mercilessly remove the images that don't tell a story at first glance. After processing, I take another critical look and reduce the number to 10-50 images per session. I edit them in the highest quality as jpegs and save them in Apple Photos. I only use Lightroom for processing/editing, not for storage. Therefore, with a few exceptions, I delete everything there.

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by fruehaufsteher2