Over the past few years I’ve combed through my photography catalogs and sifted out most of easily identifiable images that would make for a good stock photo. The original plan was to process at least 10 images a day for the stock portfolio. Presently I have at least 4,600 photos online for sale.

Here’s the thing though. I recently reorganized my photographs into one master Lightroom catalog, and what I’ve discovered is that I have saved about 312,000 images over the years. These are all images I decided to keep, meaning they are in focus and properly exposed, so they may be useful down the road.

Well, these days, it’s getting tedious to find the obviously better shots so I have resorted to sifting through my photographic subjects yet again, looking for the occasional photo that had gone unnoticed and subsequently never processed nor published. It being the dead of winter, I have settled on a goal of finding and processing at least one photograph per day. So far it’s working. I can still go to just about any year and subject directory and find a photo that I’ve glazed over.

Case in point, today. The photo I’m posting today turned up when I browsed through my 2013 mountain goat images. It’s been sitting there on the hard drive for 9 years, neglected by my eyes and editing software. Now it’s not the worlds best photo of a mountain goat, but it is a pretty nice portrait shot, in my style, and you get to see it fresh as if I took it yesterday. One of mountain goat 9, 340 master raw files of which I’ve only edited about 300 of these photos. The bottom line is that there are still a few nuggets of gold in my mountain goat collection. I just need to pick through them and find those nuggets.

I use a color coding scheme to identify my stock photos. Specifically, I tag the published stock photos with the color purple. By looking through the sorted images, any image I find that hasn’t been assigned a purple color tag means that image hasn’t been edited. Easy-peasy once the catalog subjects are organized properly.

If this photo sells a dozen times over the next 5 years, it will have paid for the effort and the time I invested in editing it. It’s that simple.