How to efficiently rate pics?

[melchioe]

I'm an Aperture refugee. i really miss the workflow I developed there, and would like to know how to replicate or replace something that was SOOOO easy in Aperture.

I am used to doing a really quick pass through each session of photos and do a triage of rating. For example, I am trying to process 478 photos I took yesterday of some dogs in our family. I want to quickly scan through them and discard the useless ones, and hopefully rate the keepers and semi-keepers quickly. What I used to do:

1. view the first photo.
2. press a number key (1-5) or the "x' key. "x" meant "tag for discard" aceeptables would get a "1", better ones would get a "2", and at first glance great ones might get a "3"
3. use the arrow key to go to the next photo. hit the appropriate number key (or "x" key) again.
4. repeat until through the entire session.
5. filter the "bad" photos (marked with an "x" and delete them all at once in a batch. (badly out of focus, pictures of a foot only, super bad exposure that I i know I can't fix in post, etc.)
6. go through the higher rated photos and pick the cream of the crop keepers and tag them with a higher rating ("4" or "5")

This would take me approximately 1 second per photo for the initial pass, so 478 photos would take maybe 8 minutes to kill the 200 obvious deletes.

Now, with ACDSee, the only way I have found is to do it one by one and do the drag thing, or highlight several (using shift-click or cmd-click) and click the appropriate number, and each rating assignment requires a mouse move and click of some sort. If I make an accidental click without having the shift or cmd key pressed, I lose the entire selection and have to repeat. Doing the initial pass of 478 photos takes over 30 minutes, and more if I mess up a selection.

I could handle not having the "x" rating by simply reserving the "1" for the trashy ones and select 2-5 for the relative goodness of the images.

I just want to figure out how to be more efficient in my triage workflow.

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Hi melchioe,

I recommend this workflow:

1. Turn on the Auto Advance feature. This automatically advances to the next image after you assign a rating etc.
   To enable this, toggle the Auto Advance button in the bottom toolbar or use the hotkey Ctrl+Q.
2. View the first photo.
3. Press ⌘1 to assign a rating of 1 (or ⌘2 to assign a rating of 2 etc). Or press the backslash key (\) to tag a photo.
4. Note the next image is automatically selected and ready to be rated. Repeat for all images.
5. Now you can use the Filter feature or Sort feature to filter or sort the file list by rating. Then do further rating or culling etc.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
David

[melchioe]

That's perfect! I still can't find that keystroke in the manual, but now that I know it, it does the trick very well! Thanks!