Three Stars Is Enough

After reading Bagelturf - Five Star Rating Is Overrated, I've decided to begin reducing my Aperture rating system to three stars (with of course rejected and 0-star), for a total of 5.

Here are the rating buckets that I now use:
X - Junk - Throw it in the trash
0 - Archive - Storage is cheap
* - Keep - Too good to trash, not good enough to show
** - Show - Good enough to show people
*** - Brag - Good enough to say Look At That, I Did That

That's all there is to it. I can rate in two passes with this system, instead of four or more with five stars. The first pass handles all the rejects and applies one star to anything I would ever want to show anyone. It's a very simple and fast decision to make. Then I select everything that has not been rejected and add one star, so I am left with one-star images marked as Keep, and all the Show and Brag images with two stars. On the second pass (filtered down to the two star or better images, now about 20% to 25% of the original quantity) I add one star to the images that I think are good enough to brag about -- a few percent. I caption all the Keep and above images (but very broadly so I can do 50 at a time), keyword the Show and above images, and adjust the Brags.