A multi-week travel shoot can easily produce ten thousand or more raw frames, and letting that pile up untouched until the trip ends is a good way to face an unmanageable backlog. I built a rolling daily triage system a few years back specifically to prevent that, and it's held up across every travel-heavy project since.
Triage every single night, no exceptions
Every night of a travel shoot, tired or not, I run a fast first-pass cull on that day's footage specifically, flagging obvious keeps and obvious rejects while the context of the day is still fresh in memory. Waiting even a few days to do this means losing the situational memory that makes fast culling decisions possible, and a delayed cull takes noticeably longer because you're re-evaluating frames cold rather than with fresh context.
Separate culling from actual editing entirely
I don't do any real color or detail editing during the nightly triage, purely flagging keep versus reject. Mixing culling and editing into one pass slows both down and I end up spending real editing time on frames that get rejected in a later pass anyway. Keeping those as genuinely separate steps, even on the same night, has meaningfully sped up the whole process.
- Cull every single night while the day's context is still fresh
- Keep culling and actual editing as fully separate passes, don't blend them
- Batch-apply base corrections across similar lighting conditions before individual tweaks
The batch step that saves the most real time
Grouping images by lighting condition, all the golden hour shots together, all the harsh midday shots together, before applying any base correction means one adjustment serves dozens of images with only minor individual tweaks needed afterward. Editing frame by frame from scratch for a truly large volume simply isn't sustainable, and batch grouping by condition is the single habit that's made processing genuinely large travel sets manageable rather than a dreaded post-trip backlog.