What do the ratings mean?
The short answer is – anything you want them to mean! We've designed them to give you flexibility in your workflow. They don't carry any inherent meaning and are a legacy of the way most programs have allowed users to rate images.
Many photographers will simply rate images they want to keep with 1 star – but there are many, many other ways to do this. Some photographer use color ratings to indicate things, like which images they'll use for their blog, which go to Instagram, and which need retouching. There is no right answer, find a way that works for you!
You can move between images by using (↑ / ↓) keys (you can also swap the direction keys in Preferences)
What are the rating shortcuts?
Keyboard shortcut | Action |
1 | Apply a 1 star rating |
2 | Apply a 2 star rating |
3 | Apply a 3 star rating |
4 | Apply a 4 star rating |
5 | Apply a 5 star rating |
6 | Apply a red color rating |
7 | Apply a yellow color rating |
8 | Apply a green color rating |
9 | Apply a blue color rating |
P | Apply a purple color rating |
0 | Clear star rating |
⌘ 0 (mac) Ctrl 0 (windows) | Clear color rating |
⌘ ⌥ 0 (mac) | Clear all ratings |
T (mac only) | Tag image |
U (mac only) | Untag image |
X (mac only) | Reject image |
⌘ 1-9/P (mac) Ctrl 1-9/P (windows) | Toggle rating filter |
⌘ and click (mac) Ctrl and click (windows) | Hide images with this filter |
Other helpful notes:
(T) allows you to tag or untag an image, or click on the square in the bottom right of the thumbnail. Note – Lightroom will not be able to read this rating type, but you can filter to your tagged images and ship them. Read more on this here.
(X) Rejects an image. Images that have been rejected are not moved or copied from Select to a different location.
You can also change your Preferences so the same rating key will also remove the rating, or also if you want to auto-advance after adding, changing or clearing a rating. Read more on Preferences here.
⚠️ When you add or remove a rating or rotate an image we create an .XMP sidecar file in the source folder. Don't delete them! These files are where your rating information is stored (except for JPGs) so they must be in the same folder as your images for any program to read your ratings. Learn more about .XMP files here.