Historian/MM4 Tip: Star Rating Your Photos
If you are anything like me, you probably take too many digital photos. That creates a challenge when it comes to organizing your photos and choosing which ones to print or put in a StoryBook. Fortunately, Historian gives us lots of tools to help. One of those tools is the Star Rating System.
Adding a Star Rating to a Photo
There are 2 ways to add a star rating to a photo. These can both be done from the media library view or the image editing view.
- Click on the stars in the Item Properties Panel, under General Information. Click on the number of stars you want to allocate to that photo. This option is also available if you select a number of images together – they can all be star-rated with a single click.
- Right-click (or click the drop-down arrow) and choose Ratings, then select your preferred option.
Viewing Your Star-Rated Images
Once your photos are star-rated, you need a way of viewing them by selecting only the images with particular star ratings. You can filter the images in your media library by star ratings in 2 places:
- On the Home Ribbon, click the Ratings button. Choose images not rated, or those with 1,2,3,4,or 5 stars and higher.
- At the top of the Organizer Panel, there is also a Rating selector, but this one gives many more options. You can choose to display items with any given star rating, or with that rating and higher, or with that rating and lower.
For example
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| “Five stars only” means only those photos rated with 5 stars | “”Three stars and lower” means those photos rated with 0, 1 2 or 3 stars | “Four stars and higher”means those photos rated with 4 or 5 stars. |
If you want to simply see all your photos, regardless of whether they have been star rated or not, click the Reset button in the ratings section of the Organizer Panel.
Using Star Ratings
Now that you know how to add stars, and how to find your starred photos, you need to figure out when to use the stars. Ultimately this is up to you, and there are many different systems that people use. If it works for you, that’s the main thing. I will give the advice you’ll often hear from me – the KISS principle applies here – Keep it Simple, Sweetheart. The more you complicate things, the less likely you are to keep it up and make it work for you. Start small, star rate your most recent photos first, or the ones that you are planning to print or scrapbook. You don’t have to give a star rating to every photo in your memory vault – just use them when it is useful to do so. Star ratings are a tool, so make them work for you, and not the other way around.
I’d add this suggestion – when you rate a batch of photos, give them all a rating. Rate the ones without much value with one star, rather than delete them (so long as you have sufficient room). This serves two purposes – first, you’ll know you’ve completed the task of rating all your photos, and you won’t wonder what all those unrated photos are. Second, keeping all your photos and using the “don’t import duplicates” function when you import photos can save unintentionally re-importing photos you’ve already decided you don’t care much for.
That first benefit was what helped me finally finish processing the thousands of photos my family inherited from my mother.
Excellent suggestion, Martha, thanks.
I LOVE the star rating feature! When I *finally* upgrade from MM 3.0 to 4.0 will my 3.0 Star Ratings move over too? Why am I so scared to install my upgrades for MM and SBC? 🙂
No worries. Your star ratings, stories and edits are all “part” of the image. They’ll move as one. Keep at it!
Thanks for this tip. Even though I am in the habit of rating my photos, I totally overlooked the Ratings button on the Home Ribbon. Speaking of keeping thing simple, I usually only use one star (for the photos I’m going to delete as a group when I’m done looking over a batch) and five stars (for the ones that will probably go in my Photo A Day album). You Pixies are a treasure of information!