Ratings are possibly the easiest way of sorting a group of photos. Quite simply, you can rate a photography from 1 – 5, 1 being “a bit rubbish…” to 5 being “Excellent!”. These are assigned by hitting the 1 to 5 keys on the keyboard.
You can see in the example above that I have started to select ratings for each of my images. The images I like have all received 3, 4, or 5 star rating where as the ones I don’t are 1 and 2 star rated. It’s worth noting that if you’re rating a large number of files, you can hold the Ctrl key (CMD on Mac), select all of the photos that you’d like to have the same rating, then press the corresponding number on the keyboard.
Once you have rated all of your photos, you can filter them by using the ‘Filter by rating…’ tool to the lower-right of the library pane. Selecting a star rating from this pane will show all photos that match or exceed that star rating. In the example below you will see that I have selected ‘5 stars or higher’, but seeing as 5 stars is the highest rating then it will only show photos rated at 5 stars.
You can also change how the rating filter works. As mentioned, as default selecting a star rating will show you photos that are rated that number or higher, but what if you want to show only photos rated at that rating? or photos rated at that number and lower? Well, luckily that’s very simple. We can change the function of the operator by selecting the small ‘Greater than or equal to’ symbol next to the star rating filter. This will show a menu with a few different operator options.
Rating your photos is also a good idea when using Adobe Lightroom for commercial jobs – this will easily allow you to see which photos you liked and which photos you didn’t, so when the client asks for these later on, they are easily accessible.
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