Marking favorite photos
Written By Nick
Last updated 3 days ago
Favoriting is how you tell Social Valet which photos are your strongest work. The system uses your favorites to pick the lead image for every Instagram post — the one that lands in your grid and decides whether someone scrolls or stops.
How to favorite a photo
You can favorite a photo from three places:
Grid view — hover over a photo and click the star icon in the top-left.
List view — click the star icon in the photo's row.
Lightbox — open a photo and click the star in the read view (not edit mode).
Click the star again to unfavorite. The state syncs everywhere — favoriting in the lightbox updates the grid, and vice versa.
Setting an album cover from the lightbox
When you have a photo open in the larger preview (lightbox), you can also set it as the album cover directly from that view — without closing the lightbox and navigating back to the grid. Look for the Set as Album Cover option in the photo actions while you're in the preview. This makes it faster to identify your hero shot and pin it while you're already looking at it in detail.
Why favorites matter
Only favorited photos are eligible to be the lead image of an Instagram post — meaning the first image in a carousel, or the single image in a one-photo post. That's the photo that shows up in your grid and your followers' feeds. Everything downstream of that — saves, profile visits, bookings — starts with whether the lead image earns a stop.
Favorites also feed the cover image rotation on your album thumbnails across the dashboard, so a well-favorited album reads as varied and intentional at a glance.
The favorites alert
If you've favorited fewer than 15% of an album's photos, the album sidebar shows an alert:
Favorite N more images to improve cover image variety on your grid.
The number ticks down as you favorite more. Once you cross the threshold, the alert disappears on its own. You can also dismiss it manually if you'd rather not see it for a particular album — it won't come back unless conditions change.
A note on Set as Album Cover
Favoriting is not the same as setting an album cover. Set as Album Cover pins one specific photo as the album's primary thumbnail, and is available both from the per-photo 3-dot menu on hover in the grid and from the lightbox view. Favoriting populates the rotating pool that the system pulls from when no cover is pinned, and it drives Instagram lead-image selection. You'll likely use both, but for different reasons.
Sorting and filtering by favorites
The photo grid has a Favorites first sort option and a Favorited only filter, both useful for sweeping through an album to confirm your picks before generating posts.