How to Simulate Star Rating in Photos 5 on Catalina

Aperture and iPhoto had an elaborate rating system - rejected, *, **, ***, ****, *****. The rating stars allowed us to search for photos based on the rating, for example for photos rated as least *** or better.

Photos offers only a binary rating system - a photo is either a favourite ♡ or not.

When Photos migrates the Aperture or Photos Libraries it replaces the star ratings assigned in Aperture of iPhoto by keywords "1 Star", "2 Star", "3 Star", ....

We can search for these rating using smart albums or the search field or the filter. And we can assign them quickly, if we drag the keywords to the quick group in the keyword manager; then even the old keyword 5, 4, 3,... shortcuts will work. But there is one problem with this - the rating keywords do not imply an order. It is complicated to search for photos that are "at least 1 Star" or better and to combine the rating with other constraints, because we cannot nest constraints in a smart album.

In Photos 1 to Photos 4 we could search for several keywords at once by renaming the predefined keywords to 5*****, 4****, 3***, etc. Then search for the minimum number of stars with a text rule for the minimum number of consecutive stars in the keywords, as described here: How to Simulate Star Ratings in Photos

This procedure has been broken in Photos 5, because of changes to the search for text for two reasons:

• The text search will no longer find a part of a word, if the word does not start with the search term. Searching for "***" will not find the three stars in "5*****".
• And the search string must not start with a "*". It should start with an alphabetic letter or digit.

For Photos 5 I renamed the rating keywords again to be able to search for a minimum number of stars. Because a text search string needs to start with a letter, my new rating keywords are now starting with the letter "r" for rating, followed by the number of stars: r*1, r**2, r***3, r****4, r*****5. It looks ugly, but why complain, if it works. Now I can search again for all photos with a rating of at least 3 stars by searching for "r***". This search will find all items with rating keywords r***3, r****4, r*****5.

If I add the rating keywords to the Quick Group in the Keyword manager, I can filter by the keywords to show only photos with a given rating in the currently viewed album.

The quick group will also make it possible to assign the rating with one key click, if the Keyword Manager is open.