Judge Your Photos
The title of this chapter was originally “Rate Your Photos,” but that just wasn’t the right term. Rating implies something casual, like comparing pears to see which ones are the most ripe. Your photos are more important than that.
Instead, you need to be judgmental about your images. That means scrutinizing them with specific quality levels in mind. Sure, it’s easy enough to say one photo is okay and another isn’t so hot, but where does that leave you? With a lot of gray area. And in your mission to take control of your digital photos, you don’t want gray areas. You want to take specific actions to make working with your library better and easier.
Judging your photos achieves two goals. It sets up a practical workflow for later, so you know right away which shots you want to share with others and which ones need work in an image editor before being ready to be made public (and which should be deleted or hidden). Judging also helps you become a better photographer, because you look at your shots critically to determine what you’re doing right or wrong, and in what areas you excel or need to improve.
In this chapter, I offer a system for judging and flagging your photos to make them most useful in your library. I also discuss how to Cull Bad Photos that don’t make the cut.
Develop a Consistent Rating System
Despite my encouragement to be a ruthless editor of your imported photos, this step is usually a lot of fun. You get to study the images you shot and experience the sense memories of capturing them.
In Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, and Photoshop Elements, you can assign ratings—typically a scale of zero to five stars—by pressing a number key. In Lightroom, for example, you press 2 for two stars, 3 for three stars, and so on. You can also click rating buttons that appear under the image thumbnail, in an information sidebar or panel, or both (Figure 25).
I prefer using the keyboard to apply ratings, as that allows me to tap a number key and then tap the right arrow key to switch to the next photo. This way I can move quickly through a set without touching the mouse or trackpad.
In Photos for Mac, Apple removed the star ratings found in iPhoto and Aperture and replaced them with a simple Favorite button. A photo is either marked a favorite or it isn’t, much like using a flag (see Labels, Flags, and Favorites, just ahead, to stick with that scheme, or see the next sidebar, “Use Star Ratings in Photos for Mac,” for a way to continue to use star ratings in Photos).
Before you start assigning stars, make sure you know what each of those stars means for your workflow. Not only do you need to be judgmental while reviewing photos, you also need to be consistent. You can assign any weight you wish to each star level. The suggestions below are my recommendations not only for assigning stars, but also flags and labels (if supported in your program).
Star Ratings
Here’s the rating system I use:
One star: A single star is the baseline, meaning the photo is in focus or is not a shot that occurred by accidentally pressing the shutter button. (I’ll address what to do with photos that don’t meet this standard in just a moment.)
Two stars: The photo shows promise and is worth revisiting. Two stars is my “on the fence” rating—it’s better than competent, but doesn’t stand out as much as others.
Three stars: The photo is definitely one I want to keep, and is worth editing to refine its appearance.
When I do my initial review pass, I rarely assign more than three stars, but often a three-star image will turn into a four- or five-star image after editing.
Four stars: A four-star photo is in good shape, likely edited somewhat, and is one I’d be happy publishing or sharing online.
Five stars: A five-star photo is one I’d be proud to put in my portfolio or hang on my wall. It’s also a good reference for days when I need inspiration or want to be reminded that I’m not wasting my time with all this camera business.
Reject: Lightroom offers a Reject rating (also available by pressing the X key). Rejected photos are, well, crummy. It happens. Photos for Mac and Photoshop Elements let you hide images that aren’t good instead of rejecting them (press ⌘-L in Photos and Option-F2 in Elements). See Cull Bad Photos for a discussion of what to do with these rejected shots, since there are a few options.
You’ll notice I didn’t start with zero stars (unrated)—that was deliberate. As mentioned in Apply Metadata at Import, some photo management applications let you assign a baseline rating to all of your images during the import stage. In Lightroom Classic, I tag every incoming photo with one star during import, because I’m confident that at least most of my shots will meet this minimum qualification.
But why not start at zero—the default rating—and build up from there? After all, I’m going to review and assign ratings to every photo anyway.
A few reasons: I’d rather reject a few bad images than potentially tap the 1 key dozens or hundreds of times. Also, to my mind, unrated photos are in a photographic limbo—since they’re not rejected and not rated, they’re “undecided.”
It also helps me think more critically as I’m evaluating the shots: I’m not deciding whether a given photo is just good enough to include in my library, I’m looking to see if it rises above the others. When I do encounter a shot that’s obviously no good, I mark it as rejected.
Labels, Flags, and Favorites
Star ratings aren’t the only options for judging photos. In Lightroom Classic you can also apply color labels or a flag—an on-or-off label—to photos. Lightroom CC offers flags, but no color labels. Photos for Mac lets you mark images as favorites. Labels, flags, and favorites act as an extra layer of metadata describing your photos, usually for specific purposes.
For example, you may assign a color label to photos belonging to a client or related to a particular job. Or maybe the labels signify steps in your editing process: regardless of rating, you could mark photos you want to edit first in red, less-important photos in orange, etc.
Flags work well as labels for short-term actions. For example, I often use flags to mark photos I want to upload to social sites, because it’s easy to quickly display only photos that have been flagged. In Lightroom Classic, choose Library > Filter by Flag > Flagged Only, or click the Flag button next to Filter in the Filmstrip panel (Figure 27).
In Lightroom CC, click the Refine Search 
button and click the Flag as Picked 
button.
When I’m done uploading the photos, I remove the flags.
In Photos, I tend to reserve favorites for images I want to remember later—not just temporarily—so for short-term actions, like collecting images I want to post online, I add the pictures to a temporary album, like so:
Select the photo(s) you want.
Drag the photo(s) to an album in the sidebar. Or, choose Images > Add To; pick an existing album or choose New Album and enter a new name. I keep an album called Temp in place just for this purpose.
When you’re ready to act on those photos, switch to that album.
Another way I’ve found labels and flags to be helpful is when reviewing a group of photos with someone else. After a vacation or other photo-heavy outing, my wife will often want to choose photos I’ve shot to share with family members. However, no matter how much I respect her opinion (she has a great eye), I don’t want her to change my ratings. Instead, she labels or flags photos she likes.
I want to reiterate that there are no solid rules for rating, labeling, or flagging photos. The software developers put the tools there for you to use as you wish, so you can determine your own rating system.
Cull Bad Photos
After you’ve passed judgment on your photos, you’ll end up with a set that probably includes a lot of one-star images, a few two-star images, and a sprinkling of three-star and four-star shots as well as some rejected or hidden ones.
The next question becomes: what to do with those unwanted photos? Some people don’t want to throw out anything, and fortunately the price of hard disks makes that possible. But are you really going to scan through your rejected photos someday to see if perhaps a hidden gem is there? Also, storage isn’t infinite, especially on an SSD. You have three options: do nothing, hide the photos, or delete the photos.
Do Nothing
Having rejected or hidden photos in your library won’t hurt anything, and it requires no more work on your part. The downside is that they occupy a lot of storage space on your disk; also, in Lightroom, which doesn’t offer a way to hide images, you’re confronted with them whenever you scroll through your shots. If they weren’t good enough to keep, why let them clutter the library?
Hide the Photos
Depending on your software of choice, you can hide the photos from view. If you’ve hidden unwanted shots in Photos or Photoshop Elements, you can make them visible again easily enough: in Photos, select the Hidden album in the sidebar (if you don’t see a Hidden album, choose View > Show Hidden Photo Album); in the Elements Organizer, choose View > Hidden Files > Show All Files.
The advantage to hiding photos is that they’re out of the way, but still around if you believe that nothing should be thrown out (or in case you realize that some blurry outtake is actually a fantastic abstract work of art). The disadvantage is that those hidden photos take up space on your disk.
Delete the Photos
If you really don’t want the bad image files stealing your disk space, delete them after you’ve gone through your initial pass. This step is much easier if you used flags or the option to hide bad images on your initial pass. (You could also delete individual photos as you review them, but I think it’s more efficient to stay focused on finishing one task—rating and flagging—before moving to the next.) Each program treats deletions differently.
Lightroom Classic:
In Lightroom Classic, choose Photo > Delete Rejected Photos (assuming you used the Rejected flag when rating your shots). You’re given the option of removing the images from the library’s catalog (in case you want to hang on to the originals) or deleting the image files from disk; I recommend the latter.
Lightroom CC:
In the My Photos panel, select an album or the All Photos item.
Click the Refine Search
button.Click the Rejected
button.Select the rejected photos you want to remove, or choose Edit > Select All to grab them all.
Choose Edit > Delete Photo(s).
In the dialog that appears, confirm that you want to go through with it by clicking Delete Photo(s).
Photos for Mac:
Open the Hidden album.
Select the hidden photos you want to remove.
Hold the ⌘ key and choose Image > Delete [number] Photo(s), or press ⌘-Delete. You can also right-click to bring up the contextual menu and choose Delete [number] Photo(s). The images are moved to the Recently Deleted album.
Photos doesn’t eliminate photos right away, giving you a chance to pluck them out of the bin for a month or so (Apple doesn’t specify exactly) after they were deleted. To recover trashed photos, open the Recently Deleted album, select the photo(s) you want to salvage, and click the Recover button.
If you want to ensure that the files are deleted immediately, open the Recently Deleted album and select the photos you want to eradicate. Click the Delete [number] Items button, and then click OK in the confirmation dialog that appears.
Photoshop Elements:
Choose View > Hidden Files > Show Only Hidden Files.
Select the hidden files and choose Edit > Delete from Catalog.
In the confirmation dialog, mark the Also Delete Selected Item(s) from the Hard Disk checkbox.
Click OK.