fotoARRAY was designed so that one click changes the selection of pictures. Click on an album, a keyword, a day in the timeline or a place on the map, and the grid shows the result. Hold Ctrl and click on a second item to add it. The tools described here all work together: you can start from an album, narrow down by year, then by keyword, and finally sort by similarity to find the best shot of a scene.
Because every filter runs against the catalog and not against the files, the result appears at once, also for a collection with several hundred thousand pictures.
The timeline panel lists every year, month and day on which a picture of the current selection was taken. The counts are shown next to the labels. Click on a day to see the pictures of that day, click on a year to see the whole year. Several entries can be selected. Since the timeline is built from the current selection, you can first pick an album and then see on which days its pictures were taken.
The timeline panel with two days selected
The date filter in the filter bar accepts parts of a date. Type "24.12." and you get every Christmas Eve of every year. Type "07" as a month and you get all pictures taken in July. Type a range to get a period. This kind of filter is not possible with a timeline alone, therefore fotoARRAY has both.
The tile menu has an entry that shows all pictures taken on the same day as the picture under the cursor. It is the fastest way to get from one picture to the whole event.
The most used filters sit in the filter bar above the grid: stars with a comparison, colour labels, flags, file type (RAW, JPEG, other), offline pictures and the date. Each active filter is shown as a small item in the bar, and each item can be removed with one click. Nothing is hidden, you always see why a picture is or is not in the view.
The filter editor with a camera and an ISO condition, the active filters in the bar above the grid
For everything else there is the filter editor. It builds conditions on camera maker, model, lens, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, title, comment, artist, date, file format and more. The operators are begins with, ends with, contains, equals, not equal, less and greater. Several conditions are combined. A filter you need often can be saved as a smart album, so it is one click away from then on.
Some filters are computed by the catalog on request: duplicates by name, size, date or content, pictures that have no GPS position, pictures whose original file is offline, pictures that look like the one under the cursor, and pictures that share its dominant colours.
A dedicated dialog lets you choose from the values actually found in your catalog, optionally limited to the current view. When you filter by focal length, a built-in database converts each lens's focal length to its 35 mm equivalent, so images from different cameras can be compared directly.
The grid can be sorted by capture date, file name, stars, colour label, last use, aspect ratio, dominant colour and picture similarity. The similarity sort puts pictures that look alike next to each other. This groups the shots of one scene across folders and is a good preparation for stacks. The sort by dominant colour arranges the whole view as a colour gradient, which is useful when you look for pictures that harmonise on one page of a book.
Pictures with GPS coordinates are shown on the map pane. Click on a place to select the pictures taken there, or draw a region to filter by it. Pictures without coordinates can be positioned by dragging them on the map, or by the entry "Set position from the map" in the tile menu. The position is stored in the catalog and can be written to XMP sidecars.
The map pane with picture positions
If you photographed with a phone and with a camera without GPS at the same time, fotoARRAY can derive the positions of the camera pictures from the phone pictures. It compares the capture times, checks whether the clocks of the two cameras differ and lets you correct the offset before the positions are applied. The same works with a GPS track file.
The map tiles are loaded from the internet. With the PRO package an offline map data file can be installed, so the map also works on a notebook without connection.
If you drag image files from a folder into the grid, the pictures with the same names are selected. This is handy when another program, for example a RAW developer, wrote a set of results into a folder: drop the folder content on the grid, and the corresponding originals are selected, ready for a colour label or an album.
FREE Timeline, date filter with repeating dates, same day, filter bar, filter editor, smart albums, all sort orders including similarity and dominant colour, duplicate and colour scan, map, set position, derive positions from other pictures or a track.
PRO Offline map data file.