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Thread: System for rating photographs in Lightroom

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    Default System for rating photographs in Lightroom

    I’m trying to come up with a system for rating my photographs in Lightroom. I'd like something with some connection to how the photographs are likely to be used. How’s this sound?

    5 Stars: Submit to BBC Nature Photographer of the Year, Audubon Magazine Photography Awards, and other contests
    4 Stars: Consider making wall prints and framing, using in a calendar, putting in a photo book, submitting to nature magazines, etc.
    3 Stars: Submit for Microstock
    2 Stars: Upload to Picasa
    1 Star: Personal interest; documentation photo. E.g. a personal life bird even with a crappy photo.
    0 Stars: Keep
    X: Delete

    Of course this will require some review of prior work. I’m not sure I’ve got any plausible 5 star photos yet. I probably have enough 4 star photos to make a nice Christmas present for friends and family though. Looking at the bird photos by another photographer I have hanging on my walls now, I’d say I’ve shot better than at least two of the three, and perhaps can match the third.

    The four star/ five star distinction may not be cut quite right. Arguably framed prints (especially large ones) should be of Nature Photographer of the Year caliber, as perhaps should be any I submit to magazines (though magazines are also sometimes interested in lesser quality but newsworthy photos.) Similarly there are some great photos I’ve seen in competitions and magazines that I still wouldn’t want to hang on my walls. (In particular, photos of environmental destruction and simple cruelty.)

    The one thing this misses is the rarity of the subject. That's important for some uses where even a fuzzy but IDable shot of a never before photographed species may be more interesting than the most gorgeous photo ever taken of an American Robin or a European Honeybee. I could indicate this with a keyword, but my goal is to be able to quickly review and categorize a day's shoot with maximum speed and minimum typing, so I know what to come back to later for editing or uploading.

    I'd also like some indication of whether I've already worked on the photograph in Lightroom/Photoshop or whether it's a good base photo that still needs to be processed.

    Thoughts? How do you rate your photos?

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    I am currently in the process of trying to come up with such a rating system myself. I have to admit yours is rather close to what I had in mind so far.

    Well, maybe not the "BBC Nature Photographer of the Year" of course, but I called my 5 stars rating "Submittable to contests".

    4 Stars was as yours: usable for prints, calendars, etc...

    3 Stars was more like "Good picture, usable mostly for identification features and documentation"

    2 Stars was "Average picture of a species for which I have no other picture"

    1 Star was "This catastrophic picture is the only one I have of this species"


    I had no definition for the 0 Stars rating. I was using it to identify my pictures as "Not rated yet". Also my ratings are independent of the species. If I have a crappy picture of a rare species, then its still a crappy picture (I have alot of those!). Anyway I have a rather large collection to classify each picture according to its species so I can easily browse all my 3 stars (yeah, i do not have 4-5 stars images yet ) in the overall catalog, or access a single species directly. I also use keywords and IPTC data to tag and identify each picture. It is not that much more extra work since on import, I add information about the place of the shooting. After each image is classified in its species collection, I add the species information. Then I finally add specific info when required (male/female, juvenile, pose if significant, etc...)

    Reading your definitions makes me rethink about the way I see my 1-2 stars ratings. I have to admit that I did not have options such as stock photo or website in mind when I thought about it. Not that I would want to modify my classification to take this into account, but it makes me rethink the way I see the whole thing.

    And for information such as if the picture has been processed, good base photo, etc..., I use Lightroom's color classification.

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    This is a great topic.

    What I do when immediately after uploading is to quickly go through allimages, hit reject on all the ones I know I don't want, select the images asPick for the ones I want to spend more time on enhancing and leaving alone theremaining images that seem fine but are not the best ones. The I delete allrejected images. My goal is to get rid of about 2/3 to 3/4 of the shots (at leastfor birds).

    Sometimes I use the colors to indicate things. I use red to indicate birds Ithink are rare, and yellow for less rare. I use blue to indicate unknown to tryto research later. I sometimes use purple for temporary grouping. I might alsoput "bird" in the key word to be able to filter on birds alone sincethe colors could be used differently on other subject matter.

    I've only used the stars a bit but have similar thoughts that 5 stars iscontest worthy and 4 stars is for prints. Most all of my pics all eligible toget uploaded to my flickr account.

    Anyway that's what I do and would also like to hear how others do it.

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    I might be drifting off-topic a bit here, but side-question: does that mean you do not consider your 4/5-stars photo for internet posting or microstock submission? If so, why?

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    Thread dead already?

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    Quote Originally Posted by P-A. Fortin View Post
    Thread dead already?
    I hope not as I'd like to see more ideas so I can adapt a better system myself.

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    Same here.

    On another topic, I would also like to have insights on how people organize their images database (catalog categories, keywords, IPTC metadata, etc..)

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    Quote Originally Posted by P-A. Fortin
    Same here.

    On another topic, I would also like to have insights on how people organize their images database (catalog categories, keywords, IPTC metadata, etc..)
    Catalog by year and then date done automatically I often add a place as a suffix manually. I keyword from a pre-entered list of the birds of the world which is hierarchical so it will put the family and order in as well, the Latin binomials are entered as alternatives automatically as are some alternative common names the IOU names are a bit North American for my liking! I have a location hierarchy entered so that if I put a nature reserve in it will put in it's designation, responsible body, county, country/biogeographical region and continent. I also keyword according to the European habitat classification EUNIS. IPTC just the country and photographer and copyright

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    Quote Originally Posted by P-A. Fortin View Post
    Same here.

    On another topic, I would also like to have insights on how people organize their images database (catalog categories, keywords, IPTC metadata, etc..)
    You'll most likely get more responses if this was a separate thread instead of changing the subject of the original post.
    Chris


    0 .· ` ' / ·. 100
    I have a high sarcasm rate. Deal with it.
    include('sarcasm.php')

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    After working with this system for a couple of weeks, it does seem to help me. I do note a couple of adjustments. First, if I've had a good shoot I finish with many more microstock shots than Picasa shots. I.e. I will submit anything that meets a certain minimal bar to microstock. However for a web album I will adjust the bar so I don't have a more than a few dozen images tops. If I've shot hundreds of keepers, then 2 is probably the microstock threshold and 3 is the web album threshold.

    At the same time, the microstock agencies will only take the sharpest images at relatively high resolution, so occasionally I do have a less than perfectly sharp image that is still very interesting due to subject, I will put it in the album but not submit it for microstock. Also, the microstock agencies seem to disproportionately prefer common birds; i.e. they'd rather see an American Robin than a Varied Thrush or a Mallard than a Eurasian Wigeon. That's exactly the inverse of what most bird photographers want to shoot and publish.

    I also wish I had decimal ratings. I.e. I'd like to be able to stack rank photographs in a group. Right now I'm looking at three photographs of a Juvenile Foster's Tern. I can see that one is clearly a 3, one is clearly a 2, and the third is in the middle. I'd like to give it a 2.1 or a 2.2 to indicate that it's a little better than the second, but that's not an option.

    So this one dimensional system isn't perfect, but it does seem to give me a better organization of my photographs that makes it easier to find and select what I want at a later date.
    Last edited by Elliotte Rusty Harold; 07-23-2011 at 08:14 AM.

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