Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I once read how one person did the ratings on their photos, in a way I rather like. It went like so:

1. Keep, but flawed deeply – out of focus, exposure wrong, etc.
2. Flawed.
3. Acceptable.
4. Special.
5. Something you’d frame or sell.

And of course with modern software you usually have a “reject” or “delete me later” category for those things that just aren’t worth it at all. The theory is that you go through each shoot one picture at a time, do your comparisons, and rate each picture as you go. I bring this up because this system works for my current photos – photos in maintenance mode. For doing the retro-tag and rate of 45,000 images, I had to modify this a bit.As with so many things, I’m doing it in multiple passes so only one pass is long.  So for each year, I’m doing one pass that is nothing more than “assign which ones I’m going to even consider printing”. Note I do these with only the thumbnail viewer – not the “full picture” viewer turned on. This is so I can quickly burn through this first pass. These get their first star. I do it this way because I can flatly reject entire runs of photos (shoots for friends, church events, testing camera equipment shots, things that aren’t as interesting as they were when I shot them, etc.).The next phase is to show a query of all the one-star photos (somewhere around 3/5 of the full project typically), then start rating them. This run is to boil out the 1-3s. Keeping in mind this is for me to make prints for a personal book, I turn on the viewer and start going through them and do glance-judgments – no long studying this round – of whether it stays a 1, goes in the “better but still bad” 2, or “this is pretty good” 3. Once I did try combining everything up to this point into one pass (reject through 3 in one go) and that worked well enough as well. Adjust to taste.The next query I do is not the 2s, but straight to the 3s. This is where it starts getting serious. Now I do 2 more passes. The first pass on the 3s is to increment anything that is just plain better. This is the first pass where I’ll pull out the loupe and look at focus and so on. Then I repeate this process on the new 4s, which leaves me with the spread I’m looking for. The 5s in my collection typically amount to less than 5%, which makes for a pretty decent count in a family-type journal book, and if I find I want to show more pictures for particular event or month, I open up the 4s and drop in a few more. We’ll see if I make any refinements, but I’ve done this with 1998-2002 so far and I rather like it. It takes a long while, but the good get sifted upward and I have had no less than 4 chances to pick each. If I’ve picked a picture 3 or more times for incrementing, it is probably safe to put in a book.