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.

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, the flag and reject buttons appear in the toolbar. Tap the flag icon to flag a photo, or the reject icon to reject it. Tap again to remove the status.

iPad & Mac

The flag and reject buttons are available in the toolbar, just like on iPhone. You can also use keyboard shortcuts for faster culling:

• P — flag the current photo.
• X — reject the current photo.
• U — remove the flag or reject status.

This makes it possible to cull through a large set of photos very quickly using just the arrow keys and P/X.

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.