Hi @StevenL, quick answer to your question, the first case – images I’ve edited but not necessarily exported already.
My casual workflow is… look through a bunch of shots, perhaps star to rate a bunch that are in the running for export (but I don’t always star them when it’s obvious I’ll use them), once starred I go back and review the similar starred shots so that I can choose my final top choice(s), then export each top choice right after it gets edited.
My custom preset that I apply to all photos as a starting point includes setting Prime noise filtering (since the added time generally hasn’t been much of an issue, and it reduces jpg file size). I shoot a lot of wildlife & nature and often crop significantly – and after cropping, the export with Prime doesn’t take so long usually.
Anyway, I usually don’t edit any photos that I haven’t already chosen to be the finals. And I export each one as soon as I’m done editing it. The problem was that I edited a bunch much quicker than they could be exported and had to wait a considerable amount of time or else if I cancelled the queue, I’d have to locate all the photos manually that I had worked on.
I saw the topic of this thread shortly after my dilemma and saw that you were thinking of improving the filter, so I mentioned my case thinking you might consider a filter which might help – e.g. allow selection of only photos which have been adjusted. If a few had been adjusted that I had decided to reject after all, at least the majority selected would be the keepers (I’d deselect the rejects from the selection – if I’m able to see which ones those are). I do realize that if I had starred the final choices (usually an unnecessary step for me) then I could have cancelled the queue and re-exported easily.
I’ve written a Visual Basic for Applications macro (which runs in Excel) that goes through my photo folders and deletes every RAW photo and .dop sidecar file which doesn’t have a JPG file of the same name (comparing first 8 characters since my camera creates 8 character filenames). I run that when I want to recover disk space. So I don’t need to tag photos for the purpose of keeping/rejecting them. If I don’t export a photo to jpg while I’m working on a new batch, then I’ll probably never do it later – it’s a reject even if it’s decent.
I went to the filter when the export queue was large and slow in the hopes of selecting everything in the export queue so that I could make changes to those photos only. I know that ability would be of limited use. But, alternatively, if I could have selected only the photos I had worked on, turned off Prime, and re-exported them all, it would have been significantly quicker than waiting for my queue to export.
I’m sure there are lots of recommendations that can be made for workflow methods which would have allowed me to re-select my final choices easier, but I generally don’t have to concern myself with formal workflows (aside from applying the preset I created, then tweak as needed, then export).
I’m not asking for a solution (unless a simple one already exists without pre-tagging/star_rating). Just sending you feedback in case it helps in some way. I really enjoy using PhotoLab.