Lightroom: Ratings

In the Grid mode, while I look and decide what’s happening with the photos, I set the auto-advance Photo → Auto Advance. That way, by just pressing any key, I will both mark the photo and advance to the next photo. Here are my settings:

Flags

P — Pick/Keep the photo, or to be moved to a collection. That’s when I don’t want to use the Quick Collection.
X — Delete the photo. When in the All Photographs: the photo will be deleted. When in a collection, the photo will be deleted from that collection. Just before being finished, I filter by rejected photos and delete them.
B — Copy the photo to the Quick Collection

Star Ratings

*          OK/Keep but nothing to write home about
**        Show the client
***      Selected by the client
****    Could be portfolio material with further processing
*****  Portfolio candidate (past, present or future)

Labels

I have my labels to:

• Red:     Website
• Yellow: Print
• Green:  Portfolio
• Blue:    Stock

• Purple: Sold

• If you want to carry the labels into Photoshop, you must setup the same labels in Photoshop Bridge.

• The Adobe Lightroom team wrote a full description on how to share the labels between Lightroom and Photoshop Bridge in Sharing labels between Lightroom and Bridge. It’s about Lightroom 2, but it’s the same in Lightroom 3.