How to assess photos quickly with a star rating system

Assessing photos isn’t the most titillating task on the planet, but it’s mission critical if you ever want to find certain photos in your expanding collection. Happily, most photo management apps—including iPhoto, Aperture, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Bridge—provide you with myriad marking methods such as flags, keywords, colored labels, and star-rating systems.

Even with these helpers, developing an easy-to-use assessment strategy is tough, and while a star rating system can be efficient, you can quickly run into trouble. For example, let’s say you look through imported photos and find a great shot so you give it three stars. You keep perusing photos and find an even better shot, so you give it three stars and then you backtrack to find the previous three-star shot and give it 2 stars instead. Repeat this time-consuming horror for an hour and you’ll vow never to use star ratings again. In fact, Photos for OS X, which replaces iPhoto and Aperture this spring, ditches star ratings for favorites, just like Photos for iOS.

Until then, here’s one possible solution to such star-rating madness...click here to read the full story on Macworld.com