Rating - send good practices

[mastodon]

I have not done any rating yet. But as of 36 000 familiy pictures, it is a need. Before I begin, please, tell me about your concept and good practises of rating photos.
Are there any standards for rating photos?
What should be a distribution of rating in a collection, a Gauss (normal) distribution? And, most of the picures are rated 3.
Does rating evaluate only the image quality factors (color, sharpness, framing etc.) or the content, too. What if these are conflicting: very good catch, but blurred, dark or pixelate?
And what are the characteristics of a picture, that is rated with 1 or 2 etc.
Whar are the wellknown failures and pitfalls?

[Jingo]

I think you are going to find a large variety of answers to this question... and all of them are valid!

Personally, I have done a bunch of different methods over the years.... I have a keyword: Special Interest|Excellent that I use on occasion to mark a photo as something I consider "good" (a nice family photo, in focus, good smile) or perhaps a photo that shows good technical aspects (rule of 3rd, bokeh)...  I also rate the images using stars from time to time... 3 for a good photo, 4 for something I'd be willing to print and hang on the wall...and the occasional though very rare 5... if Nat'l Geo called looking to buy - this would be the one I send.  An example is a breaching whale I took while in Alaska... you can see the barnacles clinging to the tail and the water droplets from his climb through the air.  Needless to say... I only have a handful of these in my collection!

I also use the colored labels to identify photos.... I have one color for "great" photos.. mostly used to filter burst shots through a series before deleting the duplicates and near misses.. but I use the colors for things like "To Print" and "Online Album".

Looking forward to hearing other thoughts...

[claudermilk]

Rating your photos is a purely subjective practice. I like the 0-5 scale offered and just use that. It's built in to the metadata and every tool I use, so there's no thought needed about keeping it once set--it follows the image everywhere.

For myself, I rate the initial images (usually RAW), then process form there. 1-2 is not converted or processed, but not so bad I will delete it immediately. 3+ is good enough to process. I reserve 4-5 for the exceptional images & only have a small number of those. Anything I've printed & gifted or put on my walls are 4-5.

I've had to do some space culls, so most of my "1" images are now purged & gone.

[jch2103]

I usually rate images in IM after downloading them from the camera. I use a pretty loose system: if I think I'm going to process an image, I'll give it 4 stars; those are the images I send to DxO PhotoLab, although I don't end up processing all of them (as I look at them more closely than when I'm reviewing a batch). One star images are candidates for later deletion (technical flaws such as blur/focus/etc., subject turned head and so on). Three stars are for future reconsideration. Five stars are rare. If I were a professional, I likely be more discerning. Like Jingo, I've changed my methods more than once over time.

Metadata is another processing step. I assign location data to all images (country/state/city/etc) and GPS coordinates to many but certainly not all (I avoid GPS coordinates for in-home photos, kids on playgrounds, etc., but do include them for things like trips to the zoo with kids and certainly travel, landscapes, etc.). I use color coding in my categories/file window layout for quality control to spot images that are missing location data, original date (esp. scanned images) and also to mark those I've uploaded to my Smugmug galleries. I should probably expand how I use QC and color coding.

Ideally I'll also assign keywords appropriate to the images at this point. I also add keywords to output images for where they're sent (e.g., SmugMug album name, iNaturalist, photo club submissions, etc.). I'm taking advantage of this unusual time to review my keywords, delete some and add others to images, but I need to do more work in this area (expanding my thesaurus, etc.). I used GeoSetter years ago to assign locations, and let it add keywords for location names; I've decided this is redundant and incomplete, so I'm going through and deleting these geo keywords where I already have location data in IM.

I'm always interested in how other folks handle these issues, hoping to improve my own practices...

[mastodon]

Interesting, because I though 1-2 star means bad but, needed. Because it has some definite failures, but has something unique: color or moment.

[jch2103]

Well, the good thing (and also the bad thing) about star ratings is that they can mean whatever you want!

[Jingo]

Interesting, because I though 1-2 star means bad but, needed. Because it has some definite failures, but has something unique: color or moment.

To me, if the image is "bad".. why rate and keep it?  I've gotten much better in recent years to just deleting images and not keeping them - same with a burst of images... pick 2 or 3 of them and delete the other 20-50...  good practice from the film days where you might only get 1-2 keepers in a pack of 36 photos... of course, I didn't throw those out.. but it is much easier to toss digital than expensive prints!

[Mario]

I delete recklessly.

[claudermilk]

Interesting, because I though 1-2 star means bad but, needed. Because it has some definite failures, but has something unique: color or moment.

To me, if the image is "bad".. why rate and keep it?  I've gotten much better in recent years to just deleting images and not keeping them - same with a burst of images... pick 2 or 3 of them and delete the other 20-50...  good practice from the film days where you might only get 1-2 keepers in a pack of 36 photos... of course, I didn't throw those out.. but it is much easier to toss digital than expensive prints!

Agreed. I use the reject for truly bad images. 1-2 is "don't want to delete, but not first pick to process now" After rating the shoot, rejects get immediately deleted. That's sometimes upwards of 30% of the files. 8fps in difficult lighting causes lots of bad images. 

[mastodon]

That means, most of you use only 3 categories/stars: average, good and excellent?

[Jingo]

That means, most of you use only 3 categories/stars: average, good and excellent?

I truly only do good and excellent... no need to rate the average because 95% of my images fall into this category.. 3% are good.. and 2% are excellent! 

[sinus]

There are x-variatons, what can be used. There is no a real standard, as far as I know. Of course some photoagencies works with an "internal" standard.

What is very important, from my point of view, is constancy. Do it always the same way.
If you gve 1 star for images to delete, and 5 stars for printing and later you will change that: easy, if you worked constant.

I use stars:
1 such files are in the IMatch workflow, started, but not ended (not only imported)
2 interesting files (for checking once)
3 top files
4 files with a lot of editing (Montagen)
5 top-files for stacks (events)

Five stars I give for files, what should be on top of a stack. I have stacked almost all files. This top-stack represents the main-image for an event.
At the beginning for stacking in IMatch we could only choose for auto-stacking (manual was/is another way) to choose the top-stack with the highest rating.
Hence I stay with that.

As I said, you could use a lot of other meanings for you. For me personally using the stars really for fine-tuning from 1-5 the quality of files, this would be really hard. Hence I use only interesting files (2) and top files (3), all others are "normal flies".