Organizing your work: Star rating photos

Some of you might be familiar with the Windows operating system's star ratings. This is a feature that allows you to award a file one to five stars, depending on their merit. You can then search for files (in this context, images) that are displaying X number of stars.

You might give your best images five stars, and those that need editing three stars—that kind of thing. Ratings appear in a wide range of photo editing applications, including Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Camera Bits' Photo Mechanic image browser, and for good reason—it's a system that's easy to implement and effective in its organizational potential. Here's how to get this happening:

Step one: Right-click an image in the Organizer.

Step two: From Ratings in the contextual menu, slide over the number of stars you'd like to award that image (from one to five). Or select one or more images in the main window, and hit any number...