What software do you use to rate your pictures?

Gabriel · Oct 10, 2015

I'm having trouble finding a good way to rate my pictures (edit the star rating metadata).

I used to use Windows Photo Gallery which persists the rating information in the picture itself. I got a new 4K screen and now WPG does not display the pictures correctly (about 20% of the picture shows as noise).

I got Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it persists data in their database instead of the picture itself which pretty much ties me to Adobe Photoshop Elements forever which is certainly not ideal.

The Windows 10 Pictures app is terrible, it doesn't allow users to add rating information.

What programs do you use? thanks for the advise.

RedFox88 · Oct 10, 2015

Lightroom

Ho72 · Oct 10, 2015

I rate in Bridge, LR and Capture One using the 1 Star/0 Star system, with 1 star being a keeper. I used to rate using all 5 stars, but what's the real difference between a 5 and a 4? And is today's 5 tomorrow's 3? An image file is either well composed, well lit and in focus or it's not, and if those things are true today then they will be true a year from now and the 1 star doesn't get second-guessed.

fishy wishy · Oct 10, 2015

ACDSee Pro lets you rate and tag..

Zoner lets you rate..

Faststone lets you tag..

DPP lets you rate..

Photo Mechanic lets you rate and tag..

there must be over a dozen programs for this.

Do you really rate your pics 1 to 5? I just tag the ones that other people might want to look at.

malch · Oct 10, 2015

Gabriel said:
I used to use Windows Photo Gallery which persists the rating information in the picture itself. I got a new 4K screen and now WPG does not display the pictures correctly (about 20% of the picture shows as noise).

I got Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it persists data in their database instead of the picture itself which pretty much ties me to Adobe Photoshop Elements forever which is certainly not ideal.

Yes, the (in)compatibility between ranking data in different programs drives me nuts.

As a coworker of mine used to say... "The wonderful thing about standards is the fact there are so many to choose from"

Hence I ended up writing my own system for ranking, tagging, browsing and searching.

Carey Brown · Oct 10, 2015

fishy wishy said:
ACDSee Pro lets you rate and tag..

Zoner lets you rate..

Faststone lets you tag..

DPP lets you rate..

Photo Mechanic lets you rate and tag..

there must be over a dozen programs for this.

Do you really rate your pics 1 to 5? I just tag the ones that other people might want to look at.

Faststone: As near as I can tell, Faststone tags are stored only in Faststone's database and cannot be written back out to the image file. If someone knows how to do this please enlighten me.

I use Lightroom for tag editing.

AxelR · Oct 10, 2015

Gabriel said:
I'm having trouble finding a good way to rate my pictures (edit the star rating metadata).

I used to use Windows Photo Gallery which persists the rating information in the picture itself. I got a new 4K screen and now WPG does not display the pictures correctly (about 20% of the picture shows as noise).

I got Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it persists data in their database instead of the picture itself which pretty much ties me to Adobe Photoshop Elements forever which is certainly not ideal.

The Windows 10 Pictures app is terrible, it doesn't allow users to add rating information.

What programs do you use? thanks for the advise.

Tagging is one of the reasons why I wrote FastPictureViewer Pro in the first place. It let you embed XMP and MS ratings (within JPEGs) or it creates/edits XMP sidecars (for RAW), you just press "1" for 1 star etc and there is a mode where rating also moves to the next image, so you just press 1-5. When you are done you can filter by rating, say to only see the 5 stars. No prob with 4K/5K monitors.

Glen Barrington · Oct 11, 2015

Gabriel said:
I'm having trouble finding a good way to rate my pictures (edit the star rating metadata).

I used to use Windows Photo Gallery which persists the rating information in the picture itself. I got a new 4K screen and now WPG does not display the pictures correctly (about 20% of the picture shows as noise).

I got Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it persists data in their database instead of the picture itself which pretty much ties me to Adobe Photoshop Elements forever which is certainly not ideal.

The Windows 10 Pictures app is terrible, it doesn't allow users to add rating information.

What programs do you use? thanks for the advise.

The way I look at it, they have to be great in my eyes or why bother with them? Using ACDSee Ultimate 9, I categorize them, place them in groups, add keywords, etc, but I don't see how rating them adds to my enjoyment of them.

The rating tools might be useful for art directors and contest judges, but I'm not either one.

hotdog321 · Oct 11, 2015

For editing, captioning and rating images, it is hard to beat Photo Mechanic. Not cheap, but nothing performs like it and virtually every pro editorial photographer uses it. Comes with lots of built-in features worth exploring. I think you can still download a test version of Photo Mechanic to see how you like it.

archrich · Oct 11, 2015

I use Photo Mechanics too and I really like it. It's fast and makes previewing and rating photos a less time consuming task for me. My D810 files open very quickly and myPC is a few years old now

I use a star system in PM which DXO and LR recognizes so I save these files in a folder and just import them. I don't use the LR library to sort and rate.

Archie

Gary Coombs · Oct 11, 2015

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hotdog321 · Oct 11, 2015

archrich said:
I use Photo Mechanics too and I really like it. It's fast and makes previewing and rating photos a less time consuming task for me. My D810 files open very quickly and myPC is a few years old now

I use a star system in PM which DXO and LR recognizes so I save these files in a folder and just import them. I don't use the LR library to sort and rate.

Archie

My experience, too. Even a fairly low-resource computer can run Photo Mechanic and I use CS6 for the actual photo prep. I find it a snap to do boiler-plate captions on hundreds of raw+jpegs at a time, then run through them to rate images. Usually I'm just looking for that handful of "keepers" for transmitting to clients.

malch · Oct 11, 2015

hotdog321 said:
My experience, too. Even a fairly low-resource computer can run Photo Mechanic and I use CS6 for the actual photo prep. I find it a snap to do boiler-plate captions on hundreds of raw+jpegs at a time, then run through them to rate images. Usually I'm just looking for that handful of "keepers" for transmitting to clients.

I would love to see a cheaper and simpler Photo Mechanic Lite for amateur shooters.

Pros are required to complete gobs of IPTC fields to meet the requirements of the major news and photo agencies. Amateurs can work effectively with a tiny subset of IPTC. For example, I use only:

* Date and time of original
* Ranking
* Headline
* Keywords
* City/State/Country

A Lite version that handled such a subset for a $30-50 license fee would be very attractive IMO.

hotdog321 · Oct 11, 2015

malch said:
hotdog321 said:

My experience, too. Even a fairly low-resource computer can run Photo Mechanic and I use CS6 for the actual photo prep. I find it a snap to do boiler-plate captions on hundreds of raw+jpegs at a time, then run through them to rate images. Usually I'm just looking for that handful of "keepers" for transmitting to clients.

Click to expand...

I would love to see a cheaper and simpler Photo Mechanic Lite for amateur shooters.

Pros are required to complete gobs of IPTC fields to meet the requirements of the major news and photo agencies. Amateurs can work effectively with a tiny subset of IPTC. For example, I use only:

* Date and time of original
* Ranking
* Headline
* Keywords
* City/State/Country

A Lite version that handled such a subset for a $30-50 license fee would be very attractive IMO.

Good idea--I agree completely. I wonder if they have played around with the idea.

tcg550 · Oct 11, 2015

I don't rate my photos. What the purpose?

What I do is bring them into ViewNX (I know, but I haven't been able to justify paying for Lightroom yet) and the delete the ones I don't like, fix the ones that need it and then tag the one ones I want to convert to jpg.

After a few months I go back and look at the ones I did not tag and then decide if I want to keep or delete them. If I can't decide I revisit at a later date.

malch · Oct 11, 2015

hotdog321 said:
hotdog321 said:

A Lite version that handled such a subset for a $30-50 license fee would be very attractive IMO.

Click to expand...

Good idea--I agree completely. I wonder if they have played around with the idea.

They seem to be smart folks and I would think so. I'm guessing they're worried about the cost of supporting the low end consumers who can ummm, how can I say this politely, be something of a burden. But that's just speculation on my part.

Cold1 · Oct 11, 2015

Daminion - excellent product for tagging, rating etc and it's free.

malch · Oct 11, 2015

I am not personally a fan but Lightroom works well for many.

Of course, like anything else it has some limitations/weaknesses but some can be overcome with plugins. LR users might want to check out this superb collection of plugins from Jeffrey Friedl:

Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)

Gabriel · Oct 12, 2015

Thanks all for the suggestions.

I usually delete the terrible ones, keep the ones that I want to see again, rate with 1 star those that I want to see if I'm in a hurry, 2 are those that I will show and 3 if a I will print.

Hans de Zomers · Oct 12, 2015

I use Photo Supreme, in my opinion the best in class for this purpose and fully compatible will all others. It also writes XMP, IPTC and Microsoft ratings.

What software do you use to rate your pictures?

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