Stars and Bars
[by Judy Herrmann]
Ratings and rankings – the star and colored label system supported by many image browser and catalog applications – give photographers a powerful way to organize images without a lot of effort.
Most of us already apply stars and/or labels as we’re culling through our captures to segregate the selects from the rejects. You can make this process even more valuable by deciding on a meaning for each rating and label and applying it consistently.
For example, our studio uses 3 stars to indicate images selected by a client. As a result, we can find all of the images that a client has ever picked by simply searching our catalog for 3 star images. Since we don’t deliver Raw or PSD files, limiting the search to 3 star plus TIF or JPG gets us everything we’ve ever delivered. Adding in the clients name as a search criteria, returns only the files selected by and delivered to that particular client.
The key here isn’t what we’ve chosen to make 3 stars mean – you can assign any meaning to the stars and the bars that makes sense for your needs. The key is using that meaning consistently so your three star images from 10 years ago have the same significance as the ones 10 years from now.
Already have a bunch of randomly rated and ranked images? Don’t stress. Just pick a date and implement your new consistent system moving forward. That way, you’ll know what any images rated and ranked after that date mean. If you decide you want to bring legacy images into alignment, don’t feel like it has to be perfect overnight. You can re-rank and re-label images organically, as need arises.
By doing nothing more than setting 3 stars and Tif as our search parameters, we can exclude everything but files delivered to clients.
Judy Herrmann has taught seminars on digital photography since 1995 and is a presenter for ASMP’s dpBestflow program, I Need A Workflow That Works For Me.
