Getting started

Language. The interface starts in French. To switch to English, open the language selector at the right end of the toolbar (it shows Français) and pick English. This guide uses the English labels; in French, Open folder… reads Ouvrir un dossier… and Include subfolders reads Inclure les sous-dossiers. See Preferences & language.

The window has three parts: the toolbar at the top, the thumbnail grid (or the viewer) in the middle, and the status bar at the bottom.

Opening a folder

Click Open folder… in the toolbar, or press Ctrl+O (Cmd+O on macOS), and pick a folder. You can also drop a folder from your file manager onto the window. Its path is then shown in the toolbar.

The folder is opened in place: nothing is imported or copied, and version 0.1.0 never modifies, moves or deletes your files.

Every file with a supported extension is listed, in file-name order (case-insensitive); other files are ignored. At the next launch, the last folder you opened is opened again. If it is not available (a memory card or a network share that is not connected), the app starts empty and tries again at the following launch.

Include subfolders

With the Include subfolders checkbox ticked, the scan descends into every subfolder as well, and the photos are sorted by their path relative to the opened folder. Ticking or unticking it rescans the open folder.

Two rules apply during the scan:

• Hidden entries are skipped: files and folders whose name starts with a dot. Besides the usual hidden files, this drops the ._IMG_0001.CR3 companion files macOS writes on memory cards formatted in exFAT, which carry an image extension but contain no image.
• Symbolic links to folders are not followed, so a link cannot make the scan loop forever. Symbolic links to files are listed.

An entry that cannot be read, such as a subfolder without read permission, is skipped and the scan goes on. The status bar then shows a warning count; hover it to see the list.

The thumbnail grid

The thumbnails fill in as they are decoded. Decoding runs in the background, in parallel on all CPU cores but one, which stays free for the interface. The visible thumbnails are decoded first, so the interface stays responsive while a large folder loads, and the grid stays smooth with thousands of photos.

• The file name is shown under each thumbnail; hover a thumbnail to see its path inside the opened folder, which tells photos with the same name in different subfolders apart.
• A spinner marks a thumbnail that is still loading.
• A warning sign (⚠) marks a file that cannot be decoded. Hover it to read the error message. The most common cause is a RAW file without a usable embedded JPEG preview (see Supported formats).
• The thumbnail size slider in the toolbar, left of the language selector, makes the thumbnails larger or smaller. It sets the smallest size: the columns then widen so that the grid fills the width of the window. Thumbnails are decoded again at a higher resolution when they grow, so they stay sharp on high-resolution screens.

Click a thumbnail to select it. Move the selection with the arrow keys, by a screenful with Page Up and Page Down, or jump to the first or last image with Home and End. The grid scrolls to keep the selection in view.

The viewer

Double-click a thumbnail, or press Enter or Space on the selected one, to open it in the viewer. The image is fitted to the window; images smaller than the window are not enlarged beyond their actual size.

• ← and → show the previous and next images. The neighbours of the current image are loaded ahead of time, so stepping through a shoot rarely waits on decoding. When it does, the thumbnail is shown in the meantime.
• Home and End jump to the first and last images.
• Esc, Enter, Space or a double-click returns to the grid, with the selection on the last image you viewed.

For RAW files, the viewer shows the camera’s full-size embedded JPEG (see Supported formats).

The status bar

While a folder is being scanned, the status bar shows Scanning the folder…. Then it shows how many images the folder contains and, while images are being decoded, how many are still waiting. Only the thumbnails on screen and a few rows around them are queued, so that number stays small and disappears once the visible part of the grid is complete. In the viewer, the status bar also shows the position of the current image, for example 12 / 340.

What is not there yet

Tagging, filtering, user-chosen sorting, blur detection, zoom and deletion are planned for later versions; see the roadmap.