Working through a folder

A viewer that can only look is half a tool. Going through a shoot means throwing some frames away, naming the keepers, and putting them where they belong — and doing that in a file manager means leaving the picture to look at a list of names, which is the one view that cannot answer “is this the good one”.

Del sends the file to the recycle bin and moves to the next picture. Forwards, not back: culling a folder carries on the way you were going, and landing on the frame you just judged would mean judging it twice. Nothing is asked first — the bin is undoable, and Explorer’s own Ctrl+Z takes the operation back — because a confirmation on every frame is what makes people stop culling in a viewer and go back to a file manager.

P keeps this one, X rejects it, U takes the mark back off. The letters are Lightroom’s, because culling is the one job in a viewer where a key is pressed hundreds of times in a row and the hands that have done it before already know where to go. Pressing the mark a picture already carries takes it off, so the way back is the key you just pressed rather than a second one to remember.

A reject is a mark, not a delete. The point of a pass is to get through the folder without stopping to decide anything irreversible, and then look at what came out. Del is still there for the frames you are sure about.

The mark goes into the file, where everything else can see it. A picture you kept is written as the EXIF rating Windows itself uses, so it shows up with a star in Explorer’s own Rating column, in its Properties, and in any program that reads a rating — this is the whole reason a viewer’s selection is worth making. A rejected one is written as the XMP rating Lightroom and Bridge use for their reject flag, which Explorer honestly reports as unrated: Windows has no “rejected” to show, and a reject dressed up as one star would turn a folder of discards into a folder of favourites.

The alternative, a small file written beside the picture, would have been a mark only nitid could see, and it would be left behind the first time the photograph was copied somewhere.

Only the metadata block is rewritten. A marked JPEG is identical to the one that went in from its start-of-scan marker onward — the same promise Ctrl+S makes for a turn, and for the same reason: nothing here runs an encoder over your pixels.

A format with nowhere to put the mark says so. JPEG carries both marks. Some formats take a rating but have no room for a reject, and some take neither; in every case the viewer reads the file back before it calls the mark saved, and tells you when it did not take rather than reporting a success the file does not contain. The file is left exactly as it was.

M walks only the pictures that are marked. The arrow keys then step between the frames you judged and skip everything you did not, and the count in the status line says marked only so the mode is never something you have to deduce. Switching it on does not move the picture you are looking at, even when that picture is one the filter leaves out: the frame you just judged is usually still on screen, and it is the next arrow key that takes you into the selection. M again gives the whole folder back. With nothing marked yet, the viewer says so instead of leaving the arrow keys quietly doing nothing.

F2 renames it. The box opens with the whole name in it and the stem selected, so typing replaces the name and leaves .jpg alone, while renaming shot.jpg to shot.png is still one keystroke away. Enter commits, Escape cancels, and the box holds the keyboard while it is open — typing “gull” must not also step through the folder and turn the picture. A name carrying a path separator is refused rather than quietly moving the file somewhere else.

Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 sort it into folders you set, and Ctrl+Shift+1-9 copy it there instead of moving it. The folders are set in the Files section of the settings; a key with nothing set says so rather than doing something surprising. The digits carry Ctrl because bare 0 and 1 have fitted the picture to the window and shown it at 100% since v0.1.0, and a sorting key added later does not get to take a viewing gesture that has been there from the beginning.

E opens the picture in the program that edits it. Not a copy, not an export — the file on screen, in whatever Windows already associates with that kind of image, which is the same program the context menu’s own “Edit” would start. It works without being configured; naming an editor in the settings only overrides the choice. Alt+1 through Alt+9 open the file in programs you name yourself, for the ones the system would never pick: a raw converter, a batch stamper, an upload script.

Nothing waits for the program to close, and the picture is not reloaded when it does — an edit takes as long as it takes, and R reloads when you want it.

Ctrl+S keeps a turn. R and Shift+R turn the picture on screen and always have; pressing Ctrl+S writes that turn into the file, so it stays turned in every other program too. Nothing is re-encoded to do it — the file’s orientation tag is rewritten and the compressed image data is left exactly as it was, byte for byte. A photograph turned this way a hundred times is the same photograph. F mirrors the picture left to right, Shift+F top to bottom, and those save the same way.

Ctrl+Shift+S saves the picture as something else. JPEG, PNG or WebP, beside the file it came from, under a name you type — the original is never touched and an existing neighbour is never replaced.

What comes out is what was on screen. The colour path is the one the shader draws with, step for step: the same curves, the same matrix, the same clamp, run over every pixel instead of the visible ones, and a gate reads the shader itself to keep the two from drifting apart. So a wide-gamut photograph can go out with its colour baked into sRGB — the numbers say what you were looking at, which is what a chat window or a forum will show, since neither reads a profile. Left unbaked, the file keeps its own numbers and its profile travels with them; that is the default for an ordinary picture, because it is the choice that can be undone.

The box says what a save will cost before it writes anything. JPEG has no transparency, so a picture with any will be filled with white. Eight bits per channel is all JPEG and WebP store, so a sixteen-bit source loses the rest. And an HDR picture becomes SDR the way it already looks on an ordinary screen: reference white lands on white, and highlights above it clip. That is a real loss and it is stated plainly — those highlights are not coming back — but it is exactly what you were seeing, rather than a second rendering that would make the file disagree with its own preview.

Ctrl+X frames a crop. The box opens over the whole picture; drag a corner or an edge to bring it in, drag inside it to slide it about, or press somewhere clear of it to draw a new one. The buttons along the bottom hold it to a shape — 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 and their upright forms, or the picture’s own — and the box reshapes as soon as you pick one rather than waiting for the next drag. Enter takes the crop, Esc leaves without taking it. The handles stay the same size under the pointer whatever the zoom, and the box is remembered in the picture’s coordinates, so zooming or panning mid-crop moves the view and not the framing.

A crop is always a copy. It lands beside the original as photo-crop.jpg, and a second one as photo-crop-2.jpg; the file you were looking at is never written to. That is the difference between this and Ctrl+S: a turn is a label and can be turned back, while a crop throws pixels away, and a viewer that did that in place could destroy a photograph with one keystroke and no undo.

A JPEG is cropped without being re-encoded, where it can be. JPEG stores a picture as blocks, and a crop whose edges land on those blocks can be made by moving the compressed data itself — no decoding, no quantising, no encoder in the path at all. The surviving coefficients are the numbers the original file held and its quantisation tables travel with them, so the kept part of the picture is bit-for-bit what it was. Crop a photograph fifty times this way and the fiftieth is as clean as the first.

One honest detail, since the point of the feature is honesty: on a subsampled JPEG — which most photographs are — a border one pixel wide along the cut can shift very slightly. The colour channels are stored at half resolution and the decoder interpolates them, so a pixel on the new edge no longer has the neighbour it was interpolated against. Nothing is re-quantised and the interior is identical to the byte; it is the boundary that had to be invented, and it is invented once rather than accumulating with every crop.

The blocks are usually 16×16 pixels, so an arbitrary crop is up to fifteen pixels from one that can be done this way. The bar says which you are about to get: it names the size the edges would move to, or says the crop is already on the grid, or says the file has to be re-encoded and lets you decide. It never quietly does one when it said the other. A progressive JPEG, a PNG, a HEIC — anything that cannot take the coefficient path — is decoded, cut and written as a PNG, which is lossless, so a crop that must be re-encoded at least does not lose anything twice. A sixteen-bit source goes out at eight bits per channel on that path, and the bar says so before it happens.

Turning and saving are separate on purpose: looking at a photograph from another angle leaves nothing on disk until you say so. The one thing to know is that a program which ignores EXIF orientation — a few old tools do — will still show the original; the trade is deliberate, and the reasoning is in ADR 0024.

Everything here goes through the shell’s own file operations, never a direct write. That is what makes a delete land in the recycle bin instead of being gone, puts the operation on the shell’s undo stack, and resolves a name that is already taken the way the rest of Windows resolves it — a second frame of the same name lands beside the first rather than replacing it. A viewer that deleted with a plain filesystem call would be a viewer that loses photographs, whatever it said in a confirmation dialog.