You’ve had a great vacation, and having dumped the suitcases on the bedroom floor, you head straight for the computer to start uploading your photos. 100… 200… 300… 1000… how many photos did you take?!?
Sound familiar? You can’t possibly ask your friends and family to sit through hundreds of photos of your feet, as you laid by the pool watching the kids play. It’s time to start sorting through them and narrowing it down to the best ones – the ones you’d be proud to show off.
Lightroom offers two different rating systems – star ratings and flags. (If you haven’t used them before, there’s an easy introduction to rating your photos in my free Lightroom 5 Quick Start Guide.)
Star ratings are usually used to record the quality or value of the photo, with 1 star photos being poor, and 5 star photos being the best you’ve ever taken. They’re standard across almost all digital asset management (photo cataloguing) software, so if you chose to use other software in the future, you won’t lose your work. Grading the photos gives you more information to help you find the best photos again later. The downside is if you’re indecisive, you could spend ages trying to figure out whether a photo deserves 2 stars or 3, and as your photography improves, your older 3 star photos might only count as 2 star photos now.
Flags are much simpler, having just 3 states – flagged, unflagged or rejected. It’s quicker to decide whether you like the photo or not, so if you find yourself dithering between 2 and 3 stars, flags might be the ideal system for you.
If you want the best of both worlds, you can do two passes through the photos, firstly with flags to determine which photos are worth keeping, and then again, this time grading the keepers with star ratings.
If you’re wondering what I do, here’s my system for my personal photos:
0 stars/unflagged – haven’t sorted them yet
Reject flag – delete it
1 star – not quite bad enough to delete, but will probably never see the light of day again, so no extra time spent on it. Yes, I’m a packrat. 😉
2 stars – average photo which might be used to set the scene in a photobook someday, so it’s worth adding a few keywords and other metadata, as well as a quick pass through Develop
3 stars – good photo, will be shared with friends and family, so plenty of metadata to help find it again in the future, and edit it more carefully in Develop
4 stars – great photo, may end up as a large print on the wall, likely retouched in Photoshop. I only add 4 stars on a later pass through the 3 star photos, so there are very few that qualify as 4 star photos.
5 stars – reserved for the best photos I’ll ever take
What’s your system? Do you use flags or stars? Or a mix of both?
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Thank you for the Flag and Star rating suggestion.
Just came across this post while working to refine my use of flags and stars. Excellent post and also appreciated seeing others’ comments. My new workflow is this:
* First, I use flags when I import my photos to indicate which to reject and which to keep.
* Next, I delete all the rejected photos from LR and my drive.
* For the keepers, I flag them 3, 4, or 5. (I don’t use 1 or 2 because those would be the same as the rejects.) A 3 is fine, captures the moment but isn’t especially amazing. A 4 is really good, would definitely go in an album. A 5 is for a picture I might hang on my wall.
* I use a color as a temporary marking for the photos I want to export to Apple Photos as jpeg’s to be available on all my devices and for easy sharing with friends and family. Generally speaking, all the 4s and 5s get marked for export, but if there are multiples of the same shot that are all 3s, only a couple go to Photos. I have a Smart Collection for the color coded one and then once I export to Photos, I delete the color.
You might find this post useful too Rivki https://www.lightroomqueen.com/rating-workflow-infographic/
I use the flags in the first pass and stars in the second. But one question that bugs me is this: how do I handle multiple shots of similar quality ( I tend to be trigger happy and use drive mode often for portraits) – should I flag them off or rate them down?
Good question. You’ll have to figure out what works for you. Personally, I pick my favorite and downgrade the others (or better still, mark them as rejects and later delete them).
Hi!
Thanks for this article. It has inspired me for finding hopefully the right combination for me to keep everything organised . At the moment I have over-engineerized my catalog management and it was impossible to maintain.
I’m thinking to have something like this and I’d like to know your opinion:
FLAGGED CORRECTED
UNFLAGGED NEED CORECTION
REJECTED TO DELETE
2 STARS MAYBE
3 STARS TO SHOW TO FRIENDS
4 STARS TO PUBLISH
5 STARS THE BEST
GREEN LANDSCAPES
YELLOW STREET
PURPLE PORTRAITS
BLUE PERSONAL
PURPLE OTHER
There are 2 things that concert me:
1. I’d like to have multiple color flags for a single photo. For example I have a portrait photo that it can be considered also as a personal one
2. Tipically I have my RAW file with some basic corrections and a TIFF file when I edit open it in Photoshop. I don’t have JPEGs because I export them when I need. If I want to put a landscape photo in my portfolio, it means I put 5 stars and a green label on the TIFF file. What about the RAW? Do you think it’s better replicate the same? It doesn’t make any difference?
Interesting setup with the flags. You can’t have multiple colors on a single photo, but I’d use collections to group ones like personal and portrait. I tend to try to stay consistent over all file types for simplicity.
In the meantime I changed the meaning of colors for something more generic, and it looks it’s working (for me)
RED: PEOPLE
GREEN: PERSONAL
YELLOW: PLACES
BLUE: THINGS
PURPLE: OTHER
I just use flags to know which files have been edited to completion.
My only color, Blue, means the file has been exported / used publicly / or archived external HD Print ready.
I would NEVER attempt stars, you’ve never seen Indecision on this level. LOL
Yes. LR blasphemy, perhaps, but it works for me : /
LOL I suffer the same indecision on start ratings at times. As long as you have a system that you understand, that’s all that really matters.
Thank you for this article. I’ve just started moving all my photos to Lightroom, and I really enjoy using it, but I get frustrated with the “Why?” question. In other words, WHY do you use ____? Most of the sites I’ve visited spend a ton of time on the “How”, aka How to do ___. But leave off why you might want to do that.
This article really crystalized for me WHY I would use flags and stars along with when and how. Thank you for including your steps and how a photo gets each star rating. That was incredibly helpful for me in thinking about my own rating system.
Glad to hear it helped Jennifer!
Flag rejects. The star keepers
Mine has been recently modified to work with Fuji (no files need to be renamed)
1. Pics imported to computer, with a copy of the original exported to an EHD.
2. Pics are then viewed and given a rejection flag rating if they’re not worth persuing.
3. Pics now undergo basic processing (crop, horizon, to process as B&W or colour etc)
4. Pics reviewed again and more reject flag applied
5. Pics now undergo more intensive processing along with more localised keywording etc.
6. Pics now exported to desktop folder in 3 variants for low & hi res jpg + tiff
7. Low Res jpgs uploaded to web via forum or web site and given a 2 star rating
8. Those not uploaded given a 1 star rating indicating a future use for the image, but not ATM.
All images given a rejection flag are not only removed from the catlaogue, but also deleted from the desktop as well. A copy of the original is still on 2 EHD’s if needed as EHD space is easier and cheaper to mange than internal HD space. The internal HD is backed up by Time Machine and I manage that space as though it is at a premium.
3,4 & 5 star ratings have yet to be used, but cover future situations such as large numbers of 1 & 2 star images that need further refining, also images that may get uploaded to an image library (*a what? i hear you say) or gets loads of positive reviews on numerous forums where ever the iamge is posted.
Interesting workflow Andrew, thanks for sharing!
I tend to do 2 passes. 1st pass I give anything worth a second look one or more stars – higher the number, better the image. Then when I’m ready to Develop, I filter for >= 1 (or 2) star. When I’ve edited an image and exported a copy to a different folder structure of Edited images, I use Pick flag to show it’s complete. Colour coding is for output types – print/FB/web/camera club competitions/etc. May be complicated but works for me…
Interesting. Why the export to a different folder structure?
This is rather late, but thought someone might find it interesting. I struggled with ratings for a long time and finally came up with a system similar to yours for star ratings. I use flags in the first step primarily to reject photos. The I rate them as follows:
1 star: Normally a reject, but one i want to keep for some unusual reason.
2 star: Keepers.
3 star: Best of a particular shoot, the ones I show my friends.
4 star: My really good shots, a very small percentage.
5 star: My portfolio – the best of the best.
Hope this helps someone.
I find it interesting TJ! 🙂
This is my approach:
1) first pass, delete out-of-focus or duplicates to clean imported photos by marking them as Rejected
2) leave the bad photos with 0-stars, do not use 1-2 stars and mark with 3 stars all the good-to-awesome photos
3) filter for >= 3 stars and mark the best photos among them as 4 stars
4) filter for >= 4 stars and mark very few photos as awesome with 5 stars
5) create a collection set for the import with two dynamic collections within it: picks and selects (as suggested in Scott Kelby’s book). Picks is for >= 3 stars and Selects is for >= 4 stars. Usually I publish only Selects along with some photos in Picks (which is a superset of selects).
Previously I used colors to mark best photos but I think that this is a better approach for me. I use flags only to mark photos for removal or to mark them to use as a temporary filter when I’m working on the photos.
Interesting Gianni, why skip 1 and 2?
Given the fact that really bad photos are completely removed from the imported photos, 0, 1 and 2 stars photos would be three levels of not-good (i.e. <=3 stars) photos. I think that if I don't find them good, I won't publish, print or show them to anyone and so I don't waste too much time in a such difficult (for me) distinction among these three levels of badness. Usually I end up with few 0-stars photos (because very bad are deleted, as said), the majority of photos marked with 3-stars, few of them upgraded to 4-stars and really really few 5-star photos. At present time I find this categorization useful to me, but I'm not an experienced photographer like you and other people in this blog for sure, so suggestions are always welcome 🙂
That makes sense Gianni – I was just interested in the logic behind it!
I use a combination of colours and flags. I have a multiple pass system. First iteration is going through the whole set and hitting 7 to colour yellow any photos which are in focus, well composed, ones that I don’t want to delete later. Second iteration is go back through the yellow ones and from those pick out candidates for public (Flickr, blog) which I tag green and private (Facebook) tagged blue, doing editing + colour correction on the ones that need it. Third and final pass is to go through the green and blue ones and Flag the ones that will be uploaded. Finally, say a week or so later when I am happy with the choices I have made, and after a last look through any that didn’t make the first cut, I will delete all of the images that had no colours or flags assigned. If they weren’t interesting enough in the first instance, then I’m never going to look at them again.
Interesting choice Luke. What happens if you want to put a photo on both Flickr and Facebook?
I create separate upload sets for Flickr and Facebook, where I put them in the order that I want. I tend to throw a few of the Flickr ones into the Facebook set as a “teaser” to get FB people to go over to the relevant Flickr set, which I link to in the description. Usually none of the Facebook ones make it over to the Flickr set as for some time now I’ve stopped putting personal stuff up there.
That makes sense, thanks for sharing Luke!
Stars are in the metadata – and can be used outside LR, while flags ONLY exist witin LR. You can use what YOU like, if it suites your workflow. (I never go outside LR !!)
That’s an excellent point dardi1951. Which do you use?
Good point. Thanks!
Good point. Color ratings also transfer between other programs.
I used to play with all this but now I only use flags, and of those, only a couple. When I sort through my images from a shoot, if I like them, I give them 2 stars. (I start at 2 stars because of some sorting issues I was having.)
Additionally, for weddings, I give 3 stars to the images I want to use on the sneak peek web page. For portraits, I give 3 stars to the images the client picked. For my own stuff, the 2 stars suffice.
It might be different if I actually did photography for a living and had hundreds if not thousands of images to sort through every week, but alas, I don’t. My needs are limited and I keep my rating system simple.
Sounds like it works well for you Steve. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity.
I use flags always, and stars occasionally. You forgot to talk about colors! I use them to designate different types of uses for the images.
Colors are on my list for a separate blog post, don’t worry! I’m interested to see how different people use them.
6 red: focus stack raws (not the final stack)
7 yellow: HDR raws (not the final HDR)
8 green: pano raws (not the final pano)
9 blue: aspect ratio change from 3:2
I then create a smart collection that excludes all colors so I only see original or final photos (not the files used to create a final image).
flag to delete only
1-5 star rating similar to yours
Interesting Leander – you use them for similar purposes as I do.