I have used QI & Ultimate for about ten years and love it.
My part time pursuit is photographing amateur musical productions where a dress rehearsal will typically yield 300+ shots. As soon as I get home I download the images from the camera via QI then I open either PhotoImpact, PsE, Paint or GIMP and the grind begins.

What I want is a fast way of tagging images, within QI, into several classes.  I would like to see a new capability within the "Flash card copy/move" function so that once all the images are off the camera and have been renamed by QI to the date/time format, I can quickly view them and click a box on each image to tag the 'keepers', maybe's and dross.  The entire card contents would remain in the original file for safety but several new sub files would be created with the best, maybe's, unlikely, dross, etc images.  That way I can quickly rank the photos before I start adjusting the images in GIMP, PsE, or whatever image manipulator is flavour of the month.  I can see travellers using function to tag their files with location key words as well.

Is this likely to appear within QI any time soon?

Cheers
Brian

Thanks Terry.  I tried the album and Rating system years ago but gave up as these are internal to QI/QU.  I could not see how to select/tag the images in QI then log out of QI and then load just the high raters into PsE.

I want duplicates to be made of all the keepers and to have them placed in a standard Windows format directory that I can then access with whatever image manipulation program.

Cheers
Brian 

Thanks Terry,

Your methods work.
I think there might be a faster way. 
I found I can just drag the keepers to the queue, select all, copy images, create relevant directory, copy.

I don't know why I was blind to this.  Thanks for opening my eyes.

Cheers
Brian

Wow,
My understanding of QU was way out of date. 
Over 10+ years the features have crept in and I have said to my self - "yeah - know about that" or  "I'll read up on that later" and I have missed the great and expanded features.  All I was doing with QU was importing from the memory card with change to date naming and printing the final result.

I spent all day RTFM and today I am working this latest show (Pirates of Penzance) completely within QU.

Thanks
Brian

Brian was doing Pirates of Penzance. I have Calendar Girls to shoot tomorrow!

I have used BreezeBrowser to make my selections. The reason being that it is mega-fast and I can get cracking immediately the files are on my PC. I only pass the 'keepers' over to QU as it needs a coffee break (on my PC anyway) to do its RAW caches.

I'll try Fred's suggestion of doing the rating within QU on Monday. Just that I'll need two coffees whilst the caches are built.

I then have to move them into black and white. Brian will appreciate the niceties of that when it comes to servicing amdram. It'll be interesting to see how Mike's b&w filters cope.

Tony

I tried QU for Rating images.  When I was done I exited QU and opened the directory where the latest images were stored with PsE 6.  None of them had an externally viewable tag indicating their rating.

What did work was outlined above to create a new file of keepers using the queue then copy images to a new file.

I also tried cropping as I passed the keepers into the queue.  The glue let go unfortunately and the crop information was lost in the saved images.

So my current workflow is:-
Copy images from memory card to folder named after the shooting date.
View all images as large thumbnails.  Add keepers to the queue and delete the duds.
Open a photo manipulation program. 
Crop and adjust exposure, sometimes adjust white balance.
Zoom to get desired image size.
Save the real keepers, drop the not so goods.
Return to QU for printing.

I would like to do all this within QU but I need a way to crop, adjust exposure and zoom.  The zoom is to get all the cast to have the same head size in the program and on the foyer wall.  This is not needed for general stage shots but it is when shooting the portraits over several days where my best guess at the appropriate zoom can be way off due to bouffant hair, etc.

Cheers
Brian