I was thinking a bit about the five-star rating system that Apple provides in iPhoto and Aperture, and how the problem of image retrieval rather depends on your future self and former self agreeing about the quality of images. Over time, I've found myself being very inconsistent about rating images.

In the first case, I now consider myself to have been very generous in the past. I guess this is inevitable as one's standards are raised. Images I've rated 5 in the past, I would now give 2 or 3 at most. However, I think there's a better way to look at star ratings than just "this 4-star image is 80% of what I consider awesome", and for this clarification in my thinking, I must credit James Duncan Davidson, on the O'Reilly Aperture Blog.

I've recently started to rate pictures in the following fashion:

- Rejects: Shots which have technical faults such as missed focus, flare, or which are speculative compositions which didn't work.
- 1-star: Pictures I want to keep at all
- 2-star: Pictures I want to keep, but which need some adjustment work
- 3-star: Pictures which are at least Flickr-worthy
- 4-star: "Best of project"
- 5-star: "Best of all time"

Previously, I had no real distinction between "best of this project" and "my best work ever", which made searching difficult afterwards. I was kind of blown off-course by the Aperture manual, which suggests that the 5-star rating be given to your "picks" (which, in the above system, is roughly equivalent to "best of project").

Over time, 2-star pictures either become 3-stars or 1, depending on whether the adjustments did the trick. 1-star images often become rejects.