Choosing Favorites using Keywords in Mac Photos

I take a bunch more pictures than I want to keep, and after a “photo shoot,” choosing the “Favorites” becomes an important and difficult task. I think I finally figured out how to make it easier by rejecting the ones that aren’t favorites, rather than by picking the good ones.

I have a keyword, NotFav, for pictures that are not favorites. I’ve made a Keyword Shortcut, “x” for NotFav.

Making a Keyword Shortcut:

Use command-K (⌘K) to open the Keyword Manager, and choose Edit Keywords. Scroll down to a keyword you want to use a lot, maybe “NotFav.”  Select it, go to the right side of that line and click, and it should open a little blank for you to enter a "Shortcut," maybe “x”. 

(Sometimes, it seems, to do this you may have to make the Keyword Manager very wide to see the shortcut on the right side.)

Close by hitting OK, and at the top you will see “NotFav” with a little “x” next to it. The keyword and the shortcut will appear in this QuickGroup list at the top of the Keyword Manager

Now, with the manager open and out of the way, whenever you have a picture selected, you just type x, and you'll see “NotFav” appear for a moment in the picture, and “NotFav” will be added to the picture's keyword list. 

For more about Keywords, see this:

Find photos by keyword in Photos on Mac - Apple Support

You have to keep the Keyword Manager open to use the shortcuts, but you can move it out of the way. (I leave a tiny bit of the top visible in at the bottom of the screen.)

Then I make a Smart Album like this for NOT NotFav. I’ve imported all the new pictures that I need to work on into their own album:

So this Smart Album has all the pictures from that new album with my newest pictures that Do NOT have the keyword NotFav. 

So I go through the pictures in this Smart Album, and when I see a picture I’m sure I don’t want to be a favorite, I hit the “x” key, and, POOF, it disappears from the album—and now I have fewer pictures to look at! As I continue, the collection of pictures gets higher and higher quality, making it easier to see which ones are just not as good.

Another technique: I have a keyword, `Mark, whose shortcut is " ` ", which is really easy to hit on the keyboard. If I have a bunch of pictures scattered about that all have something in common--maybe they all have the same dog in them, or something--I'll go through and quickly Mark all of them. Then I'll use the Filter to show only the Marked pictures,

so I can decide which in that small list are redundant and can be tossed. Then I remove the Mark from all those I've marked, and I go back and find another bunch of pictures to filter out.

I find that it’s way easier to reject lesser pictures than it is to choose better pictures. (Well, there’s lots more bad ones!)