The term Marking Pictures refers to the different methods of distinguishing pictures from each other. Traditional methods exist such as filename and title, but these methods only help to make an image unique among the other stored images. Metadata can also be used to provide location, country and source data to provide additional grouping. We talked about keyword assignment to considerably narrow down the focus of selected images.

However, none of these methods describe the QUALITY of the image. Sure, we can use keywords to describe quality such as ‘favorite’, ‘nice’, ‘needs work’, but this will only muddle up our keyword list and is difficult at best to remember. Three other methods of marking pictures are available in Lightroom: Flags, Star Ratings and Colors. We discuss each one individually and then put them together for a library workflow.