Digital photography makes it very easy to take a lot of photos, and one of the most important things you can do with all those images is to flag your best photos, so that you can easily find them again.
Hey everybody, Seán Duggan here with the Adobe Learn team.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use flags and ratings to assign quality values to your images, and also how to use the filtering feature to search for photos in a variety of ways.
Let's head over to Lightroom and check it out.
Whenever I have a batch of photos to review, I typically begin by double-clicking on the first shot to see the full image.
Then I'll use the arrow keys on the keyboard or the filmstrip below the image to quickly go through the photos.
If I see one that I like, I'll add a Pick Flag to it.
You can do that with the Pick Flag icon below the image or just tap Z on the keyboard.
When I see an image that I want to get rid of, I'll click the Reject Flag icon, or I'll just tap X on the keyboard.
Adding a Reject Flag doesn't delete the image immediately, but it makes it easy to find the ones that you've marked as rejects in case you want to review them before you do delete them.
Now, not all images need to have a flag applied to them, for many photos I don't add any flags.
I'm only interested in the ones that I feel are promising or the obvious rejects.
A Pick Flag is the most basic way to assign a positive value to a photo.
You can further refine this with the star ratings.
To add a star rating, just click the icon for the number of stars that you want to add or tap that number on the keyboard.
I think that this image is pretty good, so I'll tap 3 to add three stars.
This one is interesting, but maybe not as good as the previous one, so I'll tap 2 to assign two stars to that photo.
You can add up to five stars to an image.
For my system, a three-star image is really good.
I typically only use four and five stars to further refine the three-star photos.
That's just the system that I like to use, feel free to use the star ratings in a way that works best for you.
In my review workflow, I typically apply the flags first, and then I use Lightroom's filter capability to show only the images with Pick Flags.
With only the positive flagged images visible, that's when I apply the star ratings.
Let's check out how the search filters work.
I'll click the icon of the Funnel to the right of the search field to access the filtering capabilities.
Over on the left side, I'll select the icon of the Pick Flag to display only the picked photos.
Now I can go through this smaller number of images and add star ratings to assign a more meaningful quality level.
Assigning the initial flags and then using the filters for applying the star ratings helps speed up my review process.
Now let's look at the filters in more detail.
I'll click the Pick Flag icon in the upper left to turn that filter off.
And in the Photos panel, I'll select All Photos, so that I can search all of my images.
Now I can turn the three star filters on to show all of my three star images in Lightroom.
Immediately to the left of the stars, you can choose to show photos with a rating that is greater than or equal to three stars, images with just three stars, or those that are less than or equal to three stars.
To the right of the star and the flag filters, you can see that there's a range of other options that you can use to filter your images, including whether the image has been Edited, the Type of file, what kind of Camera you used, the Location and other factors.
We've seen how you can use filters to search for images based on a variety of criteria, but you can also search using descriptive terms.
And because Lightroom has already analyzed the image content, this can be very useful.
I'll turn off my previous filters, and now I'm back to viewing all photos with no filters applied.
In the search field, I'll type horse, and out of all of my images, it finds several photos of horses, actual horses, as well as representations of horses.
It's even included a photo of Horseshoe Bend in Arizona because the word horse is in the title of that image.
Flagging and rating your photos is one of the quickest ways to enjoy them more, because it enables you to easily find your best photos using Lightroom's search and filtering features.
Give these workflow and search procedures a try with your own photos.
I'm Seán Duggan, and I'll see you in the next video.
