A folder structure on the hard drive is the first way to organize pictures, and fotoARRAY respects it. The folder tree is always visible and every picture keeps its place on the disk. But a folder can hold a picture only once. fotoARRAY adds albums, keywords and marks on top of the folders, so the same picture can be part of the vacation album, of the keyword "grandmother" and of the selection for the next photo book, without a copy being made.
All of this is stored in the catalog, not in the image files. Your originals are never touched. On request, stars, colours and keywords can be written to XMP sidecar files or read from there, so the information is not locked into fotoARRAY.
The import dialog takes a list of folders, typed, picked or dropped from the Explorer. Subfolders can be included, and you can exclude folders or file name suffixes that should never be imported, for example the folders with exported web copies. A minimum file size keeps icons and thumbnails of other programs out of the catalog.
The import dialog with the folder list, the options and the log
Pictures that are already in the catalog are recognised and skipped. A JPEG that lies next to a RAW file of the same name can be ignored, so each shot appears once. TIFF, PNG, GIF and WEBP files can be excluded when you only want the photos. Duplicates can be detected and merged during the import.
Run the synchronisation on the same folders whenever you added pictures. New files are imported, files that were moved to another imported folder are found again and keep their stars and albums, and files that disappeared are marked as offline instead of being deleted. A large import can shut the computer down when it is finished.
The previews are created in the background by the server process. You can start working while the import is still running.
An album is a list of pictures. A picture can be in as many albums as you like. Albums are organized in a tree, so an album "Vacations" can hold the albums of each year. There are four kinds:
Albums with colour and symbol. The marks are shown on the tiles.
Every album can have a colour and a symbol. The symbol is any character you type, also an emoji like 🎪 or 🎁. It is drawn on every tile that belongs to the album, so you can see in the grid which pictures already went into the book and which did not.
When user order is enabled for an album, you can move the pictures by drag and drop into the order you want for a slideshow or a photo book. The order is stored in the catalog and used by the export.
An album can be linked to a folder on the disk. fotoARRAY then shows the files from that folder instead of the originals, for example the developed versions of a project. This makes it easy to use one set of originals for several purposes.
Keywords are hierarchical. "Family" can hold "Grandparents", which holds the names of the persons. Assigning a keyword is a click on the checkbox in the tree while the pictures are selected. Selecting a branch of the tree shows all pictures below it. Several keywords can be combined with AND or with OR by a switch above the tree. Like albums, keywords can carry a colour and a symbol that is shown on the tile.
The keyword tree with checkboxes
Keywords are best used for subjects that cut across albums: persons, places, motives, technical properties. Albums are best used for events and projects.
Stars from one to five, eight colour labels and the three flags accept, neutral and reject are set with the keyboard while you look at a picture in the grid or in the single view. The number keys set the stars, the function keys set the colours. A colour label in combination with a filter creates a sub collection with one click. The flags are made for the first pass through a shooting: mark what stays and what goes, then filter by the flag.
Title, comment, copyright holder and the capture date can be edited in the properties panel. The capture date can be shifted for a whole selection when the camera clock was wrong.
A series of ten almost identical shots takes ten places in the grid. With PRO you put them into a stack. A collapsed stack shows one cover picture and a counter, an expanded stack shows all members with a band behind them. Stacks can be created by hand or automatically: fotoARRAY groups pictures that were taken within a few seconds of each other, and optionally only when they look alike. A stack survives when pictures are taken out of it, and the collapsed state is stored in the catalog.
The duplicate scan finds pictures with the same name, the same size, the same date or the same content. The result is shown as a view, so you can decide picture by picture. This is useful after several imports from the same memory card, or after merging two old catalogs.
The colour scan stores the dominant colours of every picture. Afterwards you can sort the grid by colour or show the pictures that share the colours of the picture under the cursor. For a photo book this is a fast way to find pictures that go together on one page.
Every change to the catalog is recorded. Stars, colours, keywords, album memberships, rotations and deletions can be undone step by step, also after the program was closed and opened again. Pictures you delete go to the trash of the catalog first.
FREE Import and synchronisation, folders, all four kinds of albums, manual order, album directories, keywords, stars, colour labels, flags, properties, duplicate scan, colour scan, undo, trash.
PRO Stacks, delete permanently and delete original files from the trash, rename and move folders on disk through the catalog.