Today’s Question: I thought you had said previously that you didn’t use or recommend the pick and reject flags in Lightooom Classic, but then you suggested adding a reject flag to photos you think are outtakes but that you’re not comfortable deleting. Did I misunderstand, or did you change your mind about pick and reject flags?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I generally do not recommend using the pick and reject flag features in Lightroom Classic because they are not part of an established metadata standard. However, I do use the reject flag to temporarily mark photos intended for deletion.
More Detail: There are two key reasons I prefer not to use the pick and reject flags in Lightroom Classic.
The first is that I prefer not to make a binary choice between “approve” and “reject” for my photos. Rather, I prefer to use star ratings, which provide a relative ranking for approval of photos.
The second reason is that pick and reject flags are not on par with other standard metadata fields. This creates an issue where reject flags assigned in Lightroom Classic and saved to metadata don’t appear in Bridge, and reject flags assigned in Bridge won’t appear in Lightroom Classic even if you import the metadata from the disk.
However, I don’t consider these issues to be a problem when it comes to marking photos as rejected, which in my view means marking photos for eventual deletion. In other words, in this context the reject flag is temporary, and if I were to lose those reject flags it would just mean that I lost track of photos I had intended to delete, which I wouldn’t consider to be a major problem.
So, in my workflow when I’m reviewing photos to identify favorites versus outtakes, I use a reject flag to mark the photos I intend to delete. When I’m done with my review process, I can take another look at the photos I marked for rejection to make sure I really want to delete them. If so, I can then use the Delete Rejected Photos command from the Photo menu in Lightroom Classic to batch delete photos with a reject flag in the location I’m currently browsing.
