Today’s Question: Your recent answer suggested that the purpose of assigning a reject flag to a photo is to later delete the photo. But if that’s the case, why not just delete the photo instead of marking it as rejected?
Tim’s Quick Answer: To me the Reject flag provides two key benefits. It helps streamline the workflow for deleting outtakes and provides an opportunity to make sure you really want to delete a photo before committing to that action.
More Detail: The primary reason I appreciate having the Reject flag in Lightroom Classic is that it provides a way to streamline the workflow for identifying favorites and outtakes. If you were to delete images as part of that workflow, you would need to click a button in the confirmation dialog after using the Remove Photo command. That dialog briefly interrupts your workflow, and so I prefer instead to assign a reject flag to photos I want to delete. Simply press “X” to assign a Reject flag and move on to the next image.
In addition, I appreciate having an opportunity to review the rejected photos before deleting them, just to make sure I’m completely confident in my decision to discard those photos. I’ll set a filter to view only the images that have a Reject flag assigned to them, review one last time to be sure I want to delete all of them. I can remove the Reject flag from any photos I decide to keep, and then use the “Delete Rejected Photos” command to delete photos with a Reject flag in the current folder location.
