Flag, rate, and find your photos in Lightroom on mobile

Apply flags and ratings to your best photos to easily locate them and use filters to search your entire image library.

Published December 22, 2025

00:01

Introduction

One important step that you can take to make your photo library more efficient and more enjoyable is to assign quality values to your images, so you can quickly get rid of the photos you don't need and easily locate your best shots.

Hi, I'm Seán Duggan with the Adobe Learn team, and in this tutorial, you'll learn how to use Flags and Ratings to assign quality values to your images and how to leverage the filtering capabilities in Lightroom on mobile to search in multiple ways.

00:32

Reviewing photos and assigning quality values

Let's begin by reviewing some images that I recently added to Lightroom.

I'll start by tapping on a photo to open it in the Edit view.

Then I'll tap on the photo to hide the Tools.

Now I can swipe through the photos to see which ones I like and which ones I want to get rid of.

00:51

Using flags to pick or reject images

Lightroom has two ways that you can designate the quality level of a photo - Flags and Ratings.

Flags are simple yes or no labels.

Move your finger vertically on the right side of the image to display the Flags.

From top to bottom, the choices are: Pick, No Flag and Reject.

I think of these as very basic ratings - positive, neutral or negative.

If you like a photo or think that it may have promise, you can add a Pick Flag.

If you see a photo that you want to get rid of, choose the Reject Flag.

Adding a Reject Flag does not 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.

01:42

Applying star ratings for finer selection

If you want to be more refined in how you assign quality to your images, you can use Star ratings.

To do that, swipe vertically on the left side of the image, and here you can assign one to five stars.

How you choose to use the stars is up to you.

For my own system, a three-star image is usually the highest I go during my initial image review.

I typically will only use four and five stars to further promote the three-star photos.

I'll tap the photo again and navigate back to the All photos view.

Since we just added Flags and Ratings to some of these images, here's a really useful tip: Tap on the screen with two fingers to cycle through different info overlays on the thumbnails, and one of those is Flags and Ratings.

Now let's explore how you can filter your Lightroom photos.

In the upper right,

02:40

Filtering photos by flags and ratings

I'll tap on the Funnel icon to open the Filters.

Here I have the option to Filter by Star ratings or by Flags.

And below that you can see that there are several other ways that you can filter your images.

I'll tap the third Star to look for images that have three stars.

I can tap the symbol to the left of the Stars to filter for three or more stars, three or fewer stars, or exactly three stars.

I'll tap above the Filter menu to hide it.

And now I can see all my photos that have three stars.

This is a great way to quickly find the images that I have already designated as my good photos.

The icon at the top left indicates which filter is currently active.

I can tap that to turn the filter off.

03:33

Searching photos by image content

You can also search for images based on the content in the scene, and this works even if you've never added any keywords to your photos.

Let's give it a try.

I'm currently in the All photos view and there are no filters applied.

I'll tap the Magnifying Glass icon at the top and I'll type Streetcar.

And out of all my images, it finds several photos of streetcars that I've taken over the years.

I'd actually forgotten about some of these.

That's pretty cool.

And it's just one more way that you can use Lightroom to enjoy and rediscover your photos.

Applying Flags and Ratings to your photos and knowing how to search based on the image content is an essential part of a photography workflow.

Making it possible to quickly locate the photos that you need to find using Lightroom search and filtering features.

Give these techniques a try with your own image library.

What you'll learn

Find your best photos

As you review your photos in Lightroom on mobile, you can label them with a pick or reject flag to assign a basic quality level. With star ratings you can further refine the quality designations, making it easy to locate your best images. The filtering capabilities let you search your image library using a variety of criteria and even find photos based on the content in the images.

Instruction and photography by: Seán Duggan

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