Flag & Reject

Flag & Reject is a culling workflow that helps you quickly sort through a set of photos, marking the ones you want to keep and the ones you want to discard. It's especially useful after a shoot or trip when you have dozens or hundreds of similar shots to sort through.

Flag and Reject on iPhone
Flag keepers and reject the rest as you swipe through a shoot — nothing is deleted until you choose to act on it.

How It Works

Every photo in your library starts in a neutral state — neither flagged nor rejected. As you review your photos, you mark each one:

  • Flag — marks a photo as a keeper. Use this for the shots you like and want to keep or edit further.
  • Reject — marks a photo for removal. Use this for duplicates, blurry shots, or anything you don't want to keep.

You can always change your mind — flagging or rejecting a photo is non-destructive and doesn't move or delete anything until you choose to act on it.

The Culling Workflow

A typical culling workflow looks like this:

  1. Review — open an album or your recent photos and start swiping through them one by one.
  2. Flag keepers — as you go, flag the photos you want to keep.
  3. Reject the rest — mark the photos you don't want with reject.
  4. Delete rejects — once you've reviewed everything, filter to see only rejected photos and delete them in one go.

This lets you make quick, low-pressure decisions on each photo without having to immediately commit to deleting anything.

Where to Find Flagged & Rejected Photos

Flagged and rejected photos appear in dedicated smart albums in your album list. You can tap into the Flagged or Rejected smart album to see only photos with that status, making it easy to review your selections or bulk-delete your rejects.

Using Flag & Reject

iPhone

When viewing a photo, swipe the toolbar to the right — or tap the small ‹ arrow at its left edge — to reach the flag and reject buttons. Tap the flag icon to flag a photo, or the reject icon to reject it, and tap again to clear the status. Paired with a swipe left or right to move to the next shot, you can work through a shoot without leaving the photo view.

iPhone preview also includes a photostrip, similar to Photos. Swipe or tap through nearby images without jumping back to the grid, and use Flag and Reject directly as you move through the set. That makes browsing and culling feel much faster after a shoot: mark keepers, reject misses, and keep moving.

iPad & Mac

The flag and reject buttons sit in the toolbar at all times, alongside Favorite and Delete. You can also use keyboard shortcuts for faster culling:

  • P — flag the current photo.
  • X — reject the current photo.
  • U — clear the flag or reject status.
  • ⇧P / ⇧X — flag or reject and advance to the next photo automatically.

The shifted versions are what make a real culling pass fast: hold one hand on P and X and you move through a set without touching the arrow keys at all. Your flagged and rejected statuses sync across your devices through iCloud, so a pass you make on iPad is waiting for you on the Mac.

Flag and Reject keyboard shortcuts on iPad
On iPad and Mac, Flag and Reject sit alongside Favorite and Delete, with keyboard shortcuts to categorize a photo and advance to the next.

Batch Actions

You can flag or reject multiple photos at once. Select the photos you want in the library grid, then apply flag or reject to the entire selection. This is useful when you've already identified a group of photos you want to keep or discard.

To delete all rejected photos, open the Rejected smart album, select all, and delete. See Batch Actions for more on working with multiple photos.

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