Star Ratings

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos in a matter of seconds in the most powerful manner possible. With a couple of clicks we could sort 20,000 photos and filter them down to our absolute ‘best of’ folio collection or find those priceless photos of our dog eating our shoes. Without keywords and ratings, we have 20,000 photos to look through…

So they are very powerful. But HOW they are applied is equally important, and it is this subject I want to expound upon, after seeing some very famous and influential photographers (Scott Kelby and more recently David DuChemin) totally stuff it up. The influence these guys have is expansive, and not something I can compete with obviously, but I have to do my bit to remedy the situation…. More after the jump.

Star ratings are now a defacto standard. They are ubiquitous. Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Expression Media, IDimager, iView you name it. Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata core. Even Windows supports them natively. So support is not an issue. Unlike Lightroom’s Flags for examples, the usage of which Scott Kelby suggests is a better idea! Huh? Sure Scott. Let’s all spend countless hours ranking our photographs, and then lock ourselves into one single software solution for all time instead of using an already existing and much superior solution that is cross platform and application…

But even more important than support, star ratings are the only type of file based metadata that deals with how good an image is. That means that star ratings alone can help you sort your massive collection of images and filter them down to your very best, your best, or even your worst. All with a few clicks. But it all depends on HOW you apply star ratings. If you whack a 5 star rating on all your best images, as Kelby suggests (and even David DuChemin had done as I could see on his recent CreativeLive seminar), then you’ve just gone and thrown the power of star ratings out the window.

Why? There are actually several reasons. One is that you have no room for growth as a photographer. And hey, we all grow, no matter our age or professional status. So the first rule of thumb is to give yourself room to grow. Personally, I think most photographers can suffice with using just 1,2, and 3 stars for their collection. If you are really, really good, maybe you could use 4 stars for your absolute best of collection – you know, like your 50 signature shots. Basically everyone can leave the 5 star rating for when they have 10 years more growth and a 100,000 more images to sort through. Because this brings me to the second important way to use star ratings. The real power of a rating system is when it is a ratings pyramid, with the best images at the top being relatively scarce in relation to the total number of images in the catalogue. Again, if you have 20,000 images and 10,000 of them are rated as your best shots, it’s not going to help you much. If instead you have 200 images out of that 20,000 rated as your 3 or 4 star images, then there is a powerful and realistic representation of the best of your collection. So keeping the right proportions is important, and will keep your ratings pyramid in the right shape. Otherwise you might end up with a ratings light bulb, much less useful…

In his last book on Lightroom, Scott Kelby’s less than stellar advice was to rate all your good photos as 5 stars and delete the rest… I have to say I nearly fell over when I read that (luckily I was sitting down at the time). Then he went on to suggest that you shouldn’t even use ratings and that Flags in Lightroom was a better idea… Sheesh.. I imagine Peter Krogh would be frothing at the mouth at this.

So there you go. As part of your workflow, you should review your shoots and apply star ratings across the entire shoot. If you are using CR2 or NEF or other proprietary RAW file format, the information will sit in the xmp sidecar file. If you are using DNG as your RAW format, the star ratings will be written directly into the file. A possible rating system could look like this: 0 stars for shots you don’t want to delete, but are nothing special. Up to 50% of your personal work might get no star. 1 star would be a decent shot. 2 would be an excellent shot, and 3 stars would be reserved for your absolute best. A more thorough explanation and breakdown of this system can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book, or on the dpbestflow website.