Star Ratings

Give any photo in the Library a rating from 1 to 5 stars. Ratings stick — close the folder, quit the app, come back next week, and they’re still there.

They’re also written in a standard format, so this isn’t a rating that only Macro Studio can see. Lightroom Classic, Adobe Bridge, DxO PureRAW and Photo Mechanic all read the same ratings, in both directions.

Rating a photo

Pick a photo in the filmstrip, then either:

Press 1 to 5. The fastest way, and the same keys Lightroom uses.
Click the stars under the big preview. Clicking the star that’s already the rating clears it back to unrated.

Press 0 to remove a rating.

The rating always applies to the photo you’re previewing — the one in the big preview — even when several frames are selected in the filmstrip. That’s on purpose. In Macro Studio a selection is the set of frames that will be stacked, so rating “the selection” would re-rate an entire bracket in one keypress.

Rated photos show their stars centred along the bottom of the filmstrip thumbnail. Unrated photos show nothing, which is what makes the rated ones easy to spot while you scan.

Working through a folder

By default, rating a photo moves you straight to the next one. That’s what makes culling quick — one keypress per photo, no arrow key in between.

It stops at the last photo instead of wrapping back to the top, so a long session can’t lose your place.

If you’d rather stay put — say you’re going back and forth on a rating — turn off Move to the next photo after rating in Preferences → General.

Filtering by rating

The rating menu sits next to the filename filter, above the filmstrip. It offers two ways to narrow things down:

1+ through 4+ stars — that rating or better. The everyday pick.
Only 1 star through Only 5 stars — that rating exactly, for when you want to look at just your 3-star shots and nothing else.
Unrated — the photos you haven’t got to yet.

(There’s no “5+ stars”, because it would mean exactly the same thing as “Only 5 stars”.)

This is the part that makes ratings do work rather than decorate. The filmstrip is also the set of frames that gets stacked, so filtering is culling:

Rate the duds 1.
Set the rating menu to 2+ stars.
Press A to select what’s left, then S to stack it.

Step 3 still needs the A, same as any other stack — the filter decides which photos are available to select, not which are selected.

A few things worth knowing:

The menu always shows what it’s doing. If it says “3+ stars”, photos are being hidden. Hover it to see how many of how many.
If nothing matches, the filmstrip goes empty and says so rather than quietly showing you everything. “Show me the 5-star ones” when none are 5-star has an honest answer.
Rate a photo out of the filter and it leaves the strip. Filter to 2+ stars, drop one to 1, and it goes — the next photo slides up under your cursor so you can keep going. That’s also what keeps the stack honest: a 1-star photo can’t linger in a 2+ view and end up stacked anyway.
The filter is remembered per folder for as long as the app is open, and forgotten when you quit. Coming back to yesterday’s folder never hides photos you don’t expect.

Sorting by rating

Sort → Rating puts your best shots first, so a folder you’ve been through opens with the keepers at the front of the filmstrip. Photos with the same rating stay in filename order, so nothing shuffles around as you work.

Using ratings instead of flags

Lightroom has both star ratings and pick/reject flags. Macro Studio has ratings only, and for most people that’s enough: pick a number to mean “keeper” and a number to mean “reject” and you have the same workflow with one system instead of two. Rating your keepers 5 and your rejects 1 is a common way to do it.

Where the rating is stored

It depends on the format, and it follows Adobe’s convention exactly — which is what lets other programs read it.

Format	Where the rating goes
RAW (`.CR3`, `.NEF`, `.ARW`, `.ORF`…)	a companion file next to the photo: `IMG_1234.CR3` gets `IMG_1234.xmp`
JPEG, TIFF, DNG, PNG	inside the photo file itself

The split isn’t arbitrary. A RAW file is the camera’s original and shouldn’t be rewritten, so the rating goes beside it. JPEG, TIFF, DNG and PNG all have a standard place for metadata built in — and Lightroom only looks inside those, ignoring any companion file. Putting the rating anywhere else would mean Lightroom never saw it.

Either way:

It travels with your photos. Copy the folder to another drive, or sync it through Dropbox or iCloud, and the ratings come along.
It works across computers. Keep your photos in a synced folder and rate on your desktop; the ratings are there on your laptop. Because a rating is stored per photo, two computers rating different photos never clash. Rating the same photo on two machines while one is offline is the one case your sync tool has to resolve — for JPEG, TIFF, DNG and PNG that means a conflicted copy of the photo, since the rating is part of it. Lightroom behaves the same way.
Your image is never re-saved. For JPEG, TIFF, DNG and PNG the rating is slipped into the file’s metadata area — the picture itself is not decoded, re-compressed or altered in any way. Rating a JPEG a hundred times does no more damage than rating it once, because the image data is never touched.

Nothing is written for a photo that doesn’t have a rating. Browsing a folder without rating anything leaves it exactly as it was.

If you shoot RAW+JPEG, IMG_1234.CR3 and IMG_1234.JPG start out sharing the RAW’s companion file, so rating the RAW shows on the JPEG too. Rate the JPEG itself and it gets its own rating from then on.

Lightroom needs telling to write ratings to the file. By default it keeps them in its catalogue only, where nothing else can see them. Either press ⌘S / Ctrl+S (Metadata → Save Metadata to File) after rating, or turn on Catalog Settings → Metadata → Automatically write changes into XMP once and forget about it. Until you do, a rating you set in Lightroom won’t appear here — there’s no file for us to read.

With that on, ratings travel both ways, for every format. If a photo already carries your Lightroom develop settings — in a companion file or inside the photo — Macro Studio changes only the rating and leaves every other byte untouched. If it ever meets a file it can’t safely edit, it declines to write rather than risk your settings.

Lightroom also needs telling to re-read. It doesn’t watch your files, so a rating you set in Macro Studio won’t appear on a folder Lightroom has already imported until you select that folder and choose Library → Synchronize Folder, or select the photos and use Metadata → Read Metadata from File. This is the same step Lightroom needs for a change made by any other program.

Going the other way, if you rate something in Lightroom while the same folder is already open here, press Refresh (⌘R / Ctrl+R) to pick it up.

Moving, copying, renaming and deleting

Move a photo to another folder from inside Macro Studio — by dragging it onto a folder, or with Move to folder… — and its rating goes with it, including onto another drive. Copy to folder… gives the copy its own rating and leaves the original’s in place. Rename file… carries the rating over to the new name. Delete a photo and the rating goes to the Trash alongside it.

Usually a JPEG, TIFF, DNG or PNG rating is part of the file, so it survives being moved or renamed by anything — Finder, Explorer, a backup tool. Renaming or moving a RAW file outside Macro Studio leaves its rating behind, because the companion .xmp isn’t renamed to match. Lightroom has the same limitation. If you rename a RAW outside Macro Studio, rename the matching .xmp yourself. Renaming it inside Macro Studio, with Rename file…, takes the .xmp with it.

Two cases where a JPEG, TIFF, DNG or PNG behaves like a RAW instead — its rating is in a companion file, so renaming it outside Macro Studio leaves the rating behind:

Photos you rated in an earlier version. Those ratings are all in companion files and stay there until you rate the photo again.
Files Macro Studio couldn’t write into. A file that’s locked or read-only, or an enormous stacked image — past roughly 650 megapixels, Macro Studio saves TIFF and DNG in a large-file variant it doesn’t write ratings into. Judge that one by megapixels, not by size on disk: those files are compressed and often land well under 4 GB. Either way Macro Studio falls back to a companion file rather than lose the rating.