How to Flag a Photo as a Pick in Lightroom (P)

Pressing P with an image selected marks it as a Pick, one of Lightroom's flag states used for a fast, binary first-pass triage of a shoot before more detailed star rating begins. **Why Pick/Reject exists separately from star ratings**: star ratings ask a nuanced question (how good is this image, on a 1-5 scale), which requires actual evaluation time per image. Pick and Reject instead ask a much simpler binary question (keep considering this, or discard it outright), which is faster to answer at speed while moving quickly through a large batch of images, making flags the natural first pass before the slower, more deliberate star-rating pass on whatever survives. **The three possible flag states**: an image can be Picked (P), Rejected (X), or have no flag at all (the default, unflagged state) — there's no 'maybe' flag state built in, which is intentional, forcing a faster initial decision rather than deferring it, though an unflagged image effectively serves as the de facto 'undecided' bucket. **Batch actions built around flags**: a Delete Rejected Photos command tucked into the Photo menu rounds up every image flagged Reject in the current view and offers to clear them all out in a single confirmation step, meaningfully faster than manually selecting and deleting rejected images one at a time, especially across a shoot of several hundred images. **Combining with filtering**: the Library module's filter bar lets you show only Picked images (or only Rejected, or only unflagged) at any point, meaning after an initial flagging pass you can filter down to just your Picks and move on to star-rating or editing just that narrowed set without the rejected and undecided images cluttering the view. **Related shortcuts**: X to flag as Reject, the reverse action, and the 1-5 number keys for star ratings, typically applied as a second, more detailed pass after an initial Pick/Reject triage. **Building a consistent personal convention**: because Pick, Reject, and unflagged are the only three states, different photographers land on slightly different personal conventions for what 'unflagged' means in practice — some treat it strictly as 'not yet reviewed,' others as a genuine third 'maybe' bucket for images they're deliberately deferring judgment on. Neither is wrong, but staying internally consistent about which convention you're using avoids confusion when returning to a partially-culled shoot after time away. Whichever convention you choose, documenting it somewhere (even just a personal note) helps if you return to a shoot weeks later and need to remember exactly what an unflagged image was supposed to mean at the time. **A note on speed versus certainty**: because flagging is meant to happen fast, resist the urge to second-guess a Pick or Reject decision mid-pass — if an image genuinely seems borderline, leaving it unflagged and returning to it during a dedicated second pass, rather than pausing the fast first pass to deliberate, generally produces both a faster overall cull and a more consistent set of decisions, since judgment made under time pressure during a rapid pass tends to be less reliable than judgment made deliberately during a focused follow-up review.