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

When I moved from LR2 to LR3, it did a full export and a brand new import. At that time, I've changed my labels to:

  • Red:     Print
  • Yellow: Website
  • Green:  Portfolio
  • Blue:    Stock
  • Purple: Sold
  1. If you want to carry the labels into Photoshop, you must setup the same labels in Photoshop Bridge.
  2. 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.
  • I try to keep the same steps, ratings… during the life of the product. This means that the next time I will reevaluate is when I will upgrade to Lightroom 4.
  • In case you wonder why do I have Portfolio in both the 5 stars rating and in the Green label? They are not the same. The Green label is the current portfolio. The 5 stars rating is: was in the portfolio, is in the portfolio or will be in the portfolio.
  • BTW, in my estimation, Lightroom 4 should be coming either by November or … Adobe's fiscal year ends on 3-Dec of that year. The quarters ends 3-Mar, 3-Jun, 3-Sep, and 3-Dec. They usually release their software a month before the end of the current quarter, so they can book the sales in that quarter.