Ratings, flags and color labels: the three way
Lightroom gives you three ways to mark a photo, and most photographers end up using all three at once without deciding what any of them mean. Race them against each other on the same job and the picture clears up quickly. Each marker is fast at exactly one question and slow at the other two.
One shoot, three markers, three different questions
Two of the three pairings are settled elsewhere on this site. The case for binary marking over a 1 to 5 grade is in stars versus flags, and the reason most color systems collapse by the third shoot is in color labels that survive. This is the three way: all of them lined up on the same job, judged on the same dimensions.
Start with the questions, because that is where the differences actually live.
- A flag asks: is this frame in or out?
- A star rating asks: what is this pick for?
- A color label asks: what has to happen to this photo next?
Notice that none of those is a better version of another. They are three separate questions that happen to share a keyboard. The race is not about which marker is best in the abstract. It is about which one is cheapest for the question in front of you at that moment, and what it costs when you use it for a question it was not built for.
Almost every slow catalog comes from one mistake: asking a single marker to answer two questions at once.
What a marker actually costs you
A marker's cost has two multipliers, and photographers usually only think about the first one.
The first is how many options it puts in front of you. A flag pass is one question with a yes or a no. A star pass has six positions, from no stars to five, and the boundary between two adjacent positions is a judgment made against a reference that drifts as you get tired. A label pass also has six positions, but each one names a job rather than a grade, so the question is factual: does this frame need a background fix or not.
The second, and the one that decides your evening, is how many frames you point it at. Industry ranges put a wedding day at 2,000 to 4,000 raw frames and 400 to 800 delivered images. A binary pass runs the length of the card. A star pass should only touch the picks. A label pass should touch a few dozen frames, the ones that need something done to them. Same keystroke, wildly different totals.
| Marker | Options in front of you | Frames it should touch | Type of judgment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flags | Two, in or out | Every frame on the card | Comparative, quick |
| Star ratings | Six, none through five | The picks only | Absolute, drifts when tired |
| Color labels | Six, none plus five colors | The picks that need work | Factual, does not drift |
Multiply the two columns and the ranking sorts itself out. Six options across four thousand frames is a different evening from six options across forty. This is why a photographer who rates everything 1 to 5 feels slow even with fast hands, and why the same photographer feels fast the moment ratings move behind the pick pass. The keystroke was never the problem. The number of frames facing a six way choice was.
It also explains a quieter cost. Marks you make while exhausted are the ones you revisit, and revisiting is a second full pass you did not budget for. If you keep going back over the same rejects, the fix is usually fewer options per frame rather than more discipline.
The three way, on the dimensions that matter
Speed is only one column. A marking system also has to survive the trip out of your catalog, and it has to be readable by whoever opens the job after you.
| Dimension | Flags | Star ratings | Color labels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best at | Getting through everything once | Sorting picks by purpose | Building a work queue |
| Worst at | Any shade of nuance | First pass over raw frames | Recording quality |
| Where it is stored | Written to XMP since Lightroom Classic 13.2, so visible outside the catalog | Standard XMP, travels between most programs | Writes a label name into the file, so two catalogs need the same label set to agree |
| Legible to someone else | Immediately, two states | Only with a written key | Only with a written key, and only if the names match |
| Downstream use | The edit set | Sneak peek, album, portfolio filters | Retouch list, approvals, holds |
| How it fails | You hesitate and start grading anyway | Everything ends up a 3 | Meanings drift until nobody acts on them |
The storage row is worth reading twice, because a lot of advice on this subject is out of date. Flags used to be catalog only, which is why photographers were told to keep durable meaning in ratings. Adobe's own page now states that flag states are saved to XMP as of Lightroom Classic 13.2 and are available outside the catalog. Portability is no longer the reason to split the work between the three. Clarity is.
Color labels have their own quirk. Adobe says the label's name "is then added to the photo's metadata when you apply the label," so what travels is a word, not a color. If your second shooter's catalog calls red something else, the two will not line up. Agree the set before the day, not after it, which is the whole argument in our guide to second shooter culling standards.
The keys, straight from Adobe's published list
Every shortcut below is on Adobe's Lightroom Classic shortcut list for the Library module, on Mac and Windows alike. If you learned a key from a forum thread, check it against that page rather than against habit.
| Action | Key | Key that also advances |
|---|---|---|
| Pick flag | P | Shift + P |
| Reject flag | X | Shift + X |
| Clear the flag | U | Shift + U |
| Set 1 to 5 stars | 1 to 5 | Shift + 1 to 5 |
| Take the rating back off | 0 | Shift + 0 |
| Nudge the rating up or down | ] and [ | none published |
| Red, yellow, green, blue label | 6, 7, 8, 9 | Shift + 6 to 9 |
| Purple label | no published key | Photo menu, Set Color Label |
The middle column is the one everybody learns. The right column is the one that actually changes your speed, because it collapses two presses into one: mark the frame and move on, hands never leaving position. On a card with thousands of frames that saves a keystroke per photo, and it stops the small stall where you decide, then reach, then advance.
Purple deserves its odd status. Because Adobe publishes no key for it, applying purple costs you a trip to the Photo menu, which makes it a good home for the frames you genuinely cannot decide on tonight. The full cross platform set is in our Lightroom keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet.
How to race the three on your own shoot
We have not run a lab test on this, and you should be careful with anyone who says they have, because the result depends on your genre, your keep rate and how decisive you are at eleven at night. What you can do is run the race on your own work in about an hour, using a job you already delivered so you already know the right answer.
Here is the method.
- Pick one delivered job and take a block of roughly three hundred consecutive frames from the middle of it. Consecutive matters, because the easy stretches and the hard stretches need to be in there.
- Make three copies of that block as separate collections, each with the markings cleared.
- Run three sittings on three different evenings, one marker per sitting: flags only, then ratings only, then labels only. Different evenings, because the second run on the same frames is always faster and it is not the marker doing that.
- Time each sitting and note two things while you work: how many times you hesitated for more than two seconds, and how many frames you went back and changed.
- Come back a week later and open all three. For each, ask whether you can still say what every mark meant without thinking.
What the three numbers tell you
Clock time tells you the least. Hesitations tell you whether the marker matches the question you were asking. Marks you changed later tell you the system is asking for a judgment you were not ready to make at that point in the pass. A system that survives the week later test is one you can hand to somebody else.
Most photographers who run this find the same shape: the binary pass is quickest and holds up, the rating pass is slowest in the middle of the run rather than at the start, and the label pass is fast but only because it is touching a fraction of the frames. If your results say otherwise, believe your results. It is your catalog. Worth logging the clock time somewhere, because it is also the input for working out what an hour of culling costs you.
Who wins, by the kind of work you do
The honest answer to "which is fastest" is that flags win the pass over everything, ratings win the sort of a shortlist, and labels win the to do list. The useful question is how many of the three your work actually justifies.
| The work | The smallest system that holds up |
|---|---|
| Portraits, families, solo | Flags, plus one color for frames that need retouching |
| Weddings, solo | Flags on the card, stars on the picks by purpose, labels on the handful that need work |
| Weddings with a second shooter | All three, with the label set written down and shared before the day |
| Sports and news on deadline | Flags, and a rating set in camera during the game if your body supports it |
| Commercial and editorial | Flags plus labels for approval states, since the client does the ranking, not you |
One rule covers all five rows: add a marker only when it feeds a filter you actually use. If you have never once filtered your catalog to four stars, the four star pass is unpaid work. If nothing downstream reads a color, the color is decoration on a thumbnail. That test cuts most three system setups back to two, and a lot of two system setups back to one.
For deadline work the ranking shifts, because a mark made on the camera back between plays reaches the editor before the card does. The principle survives the change of tool: one question per marker, answered once.
None of the three shortens the pass that costs you
Here is the part the marker comparison cannot fix. Whichever system you settle on, the expensive thing is not the keystroke. It is that you sat there and looked at every frame.
A UK survey of more than 300 wedding photographers, published via PetaPixel, put 11% of working time into culling and 55% into editing, against 4% actually shooting. That was measured before AI selection tools were in general use, so treat it as the shape of the problem rather than today's number. The shape has not changed: the first pass over everything is where the hours go, and no marking scheme has ever made it shorter.
That first pass is the one Kepla is being built to take off you. Kepla checks every photo from a shoot against clear criteria, sharp focus, open eyes, expression, near identical frames, and hands you a shortlist to approve. From a 2,000 photo wedding that is roughly 800 picks, and it takes minutes. It never deletes, moves or renames a single file. Every original stays exactly where it is, and anything it did not pick is one tap away.
The point for this article is where that leaves your markers. You approve the shortlist on your iPhone or iPad on the drive home, open the same shoot on the Mac when two frames need a proper look side by side, and then Lightroom gets a shortlist instead of a full card. Your stars go on a few hundred frames, your labels on a few dozen, and the pass that used to eat the evening is already done. The metadata that follows is a separate sweep, covered in renaming and keywording after the cull.
The picking app is still being built, for iPhone, iPad and Mac. The booking page is live today and free while we build.
FAQ
Which is fastest for culling: flags, star ratings or color labels?
Flags, for the pass where you look at every frame. A flag asks one question with two answers, so it is one keystroke and no deliberation. Star ratings are faster than they look, but only when applied to a shortlist rather than a full card, because a six position scale over thousands of frames is where the time goes. Color labels are quick because they should only ever touch a few dozen photos.
Do I need all three marking systems?
Probably not. The test is whether each marker feeds a filter you actually use. If you have never filtered your catalog to four stars or worked a queue of red labeled frames, that marker is unpaid work. A solo portrait photographer usually needs flags and one color. A wedding team with a second shooter is the case where all three earn their place, because the extra markers carry information between people.
Do flags, star ratings and color labels travel between programs?
Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata standard and move between most programs. Adobe states that flag states have been saved to XMP since Lightroom Classic 13.2, so flags now travel too, which reverses years of older advice. Color labels write the label's name into the file rather than a color, so two catalogs using different label sets will not line up until you standardize the names.
What are the keyboard shortcuts for flags, ratings and labels in Lightroom Classic?
In the Library module, P sets a pick flag, X sets a reject flag and U clears it. The numbers 1 to 5 set star ratings and 0 clears the rating. The keys 6, 7, 8 and 9 apply red, yellow, green and blue labels. Hold Shift with any of those and Lightroom marks the frame and moves to the next one in a single press. Adobe publishes no key for the purple label.
How do I test which marking system is fastest for my own work?
Take about three hundred consecutive frames from a job you already delivered, copy them into three collections with markings cleared, and work each one on a different evening using a single marker. Time each sitting, count how often you hesitated for more than two seconds, and count the marks you changed. Come back a week later and see which set you can still read without thinking.
Should the first pass ever use color labels?
No. Deciding whether a frame lives and deciding what work it needs are two different jobs, and doing both in one keystroke is what makes culling feel exhausting rather than merely long. Labels go on after the picks exist, and only on the picks that need something to happen. Most of your gallery should end up with no label at all, which is the correct result rather than a failure to use the feature.
Never sort photos at 1 AM again.
Kepla for Mac clears the obvious misses from a card, names the reason on every frame it sets aside, and leaves the choosing to you. Nothing is ever deleted, moved or renamed. Free through the private preview · the first hundred photographers keep it at $99 a year.