How to rate your unrated photos with AfterShoot

AfterShoot is designed to save you time by automating your pre-processing workflow. Rating photos is an important step in sorting your photos into the good, the bad, and the blurry. Here’s how to rate your unrated photos with AfterShoot automatically.

If you haven’t used AfterShoot before, this overview will help you get started. To get started rating your photos, add a new album, and hit the Start Culling button to begin.

How to save existing star ratings in AfterShoot

To save your existing star ratings (from in-camera, or another program), make sure you de-select Overwrite existing colors/stars on the Set Preferences dialogue window.

If you’re a first-time user, you should also click Change Colors/Stars from the Set Preferences dialogue to make sure the star ratings and colors that AfterShoot uses match your editing workflow in other programs. For me, for example, I use the green label to show that an edited photo is finished, red for photos that need pixel editing in Photoshop, and so on, so I don’t want my photos labeled in the culling process.

Here is how I set up my stars and color labels. To me, setting four stars for all Selected photos. Five stars for Highlights makes sense as these are (ideally) the best photos from the set.

Start the AI process to rate your unrated photos with AfterShoot

When everything is set up, click Start Culling to start the AI process working on your photos. As the program says, go grab a coffee while the magic does its work! Once it’s finished, you’ll get an email notifying you, so you can review the results.

Images that have duplicates are shown as a stack, with a number in the top left corner. Double-click to review. If you’d prefer a different image marked as the Selected one, hit S on your keyboard to switch it and automatically change the rating accordingly.

A nice feature of the duplicate review is the face zoom window. This lets you check the focus in detail when deciding between duplicates.

You can also manually change the rating of any image. For example, I liked this image a lot, so marked it as five stars to add it to Highlights.

After making any manual changes to ratings, AfterShoot will prompt you to hit CTRL-S to save your changes.

Editing your photos after ratings have been applied

Your selected photos are now ready to import to Lightroom Classic or Capture One. The idea of AfterShoot is to use it as a first step before importing into your editing program so that only the selected photos are imported. This saves time on importing, building previews, and applying import settings. For Lightroom Classic users it also saves you disk space if you build full previews.

If your photos were already imported into Lightroom Classic before culling in AfterShoot, all you need to do is sync the new ratings in Lightroom Classic. In Lightroom Classic, select all the images you’ve just worked with, and then go to Metadata > Read Metadata from Files. (If you have made metadata changes before editing in Lightroom, this tutorial has tips on how to manage that correctly.)

AfterShoot saves time by rating your unrated photos automatically

If you spend a lot of time culling then AfterShoot could be the lifesaver you need. Give it a try to see whether its AI method to rate your unrated photos works for you.