Looking at the pictures is the point of a photo collection. fotoARRAY was built around this. The grid is drawn by the graphics card, the previews come from the catalog, and the result is a view that scrolls through 300,000 pictures as smoothly as through 300. You can zoom the grid with the mouse wheel from tiny thumbnails to tiles that fill the screen, and the pictures stay sharp because the catalog holds a preview in HD quality for every one of them.
To stresstest the catalog we are using a synthetic catalog with 1.000.000 catalogs. Browsing and layouts stay fast and usuable. The new fly-over preview lets you see the details of the tiny thumbnails. (Switch on in ToolsMenu [T] - press ALT to activate also for larger thumbnails)
Most of the time fotoARRAY does not need the original files at all. Browsing, zooming, selecting, sorting and filtering work on the previews in the catalog. This means the drive with the originals can be disconnected, asleep or in another building. When a picture is opened in the single view or in the developer and the original is not there, the HD preview is shown and a note tells you so. Pictures whose original is missing can be filtered, so you know what to bring back online before a big export.
This is a display of the fly-over preview which is esspeically usefull when browsing extremely large catalogs.
For a tile whose preview has not been loaded yet, you choose what is drawn in the meantime: nothing, a tiny embedded JPEG, the dominant colour of the picture or a gradient. With the dominant colour, a fast scroll through the collection looks like a colour map of your archive.
The grid view has several modes. The row mode fits the pictures into rows of equal height and adjusts the size so that no space is wasted. The square mode crops every tile to a square, which is the most compact overview. The masonry mode keeps the aspect ratio and packs the tiles in columns. The number of columns and the spacing are yours to choose.
The page layout mode arranges the pictures like the pages of a photo book. You set the page format, DIN, landscape, square or a custom ratio, the margins and the background, and fotoARRAY distributes the pictures over the pages, picking for each frame the next picture whose aspect ratio fits. What you see in the grid is exactly what the PDF export will produce.
Photo book pages in the grid
The crop, the horizon, the rotation and the mirroring of a picture are changed directly on the tile. Draw a line along the horizon and the picture is straightened and cropped so that no corners are missing. Drag the crop frame and the layout follows. These changes are stored in the catalog as a recipe, the original file stays untouched, and they are used by the page layout, the slideshow and every export. With PRO, scanned pictures can be cropped automatically: fotoARRAY detects the frame of the scan and the dark borders.
The crop and alignment tool applied on a tile
Each tile can show the file name, the date, the stars, the colour label, the flag, the album and keyword symbols and the RAW marker. You switch these on and off in the tile settings. In the page layout, PRO can mark pictures that look alike, so you do not put two shots of the same scene on one page by mistake.
The space bar switches between the grid and the single view of the picture under the cursor. In the single view you zoom with the wheel, move with the mouse and step through the pictures with the arrow keys. A filmstrip at the bottom keeps the context. Ctrl+F1 hides the side panels temporarily, so the picture gets the whole window.
The single view with the filmstrip
F1 starts a slideshow of the current view in full screen, with the pictures scaled to the screen. Stars and colour labels can be set with the keyboard while the show is running, so the slideshow doubles as a comfortable way to rate a shooting. A fast forward mode runs through a large view quickly, which is a good way to refresh your memory of an event before you look for a specific picture.
Select two or more pictures and open the compare view. The pictures are shown side by side with synchronised zoom and position. Because the zoom is relative, a picture with fewer pixels is zoomed more, so you always compare the same part of the scene. Rate, flag and reject directly in the compare view.
The compare view with synchronised zoom
fotoARRAY has a light and a dark theme. The size of the user interface can be set in five steps, from extra small for a large monitor with many panels to extra large for a notebook on the couch. The side panels can be hidden one by one, and the layout of the panels is remembered per catalog.
Press CTRL+ALT + plus/minus to change the size of the user interface.
FREE Grid, rows, squares, masonry, page layouts, crop, straighten, rotate and flip on the tile, tile information, placeholders, single view, slideshow, compare view, themes, UI scale. The Free Edition shows up to 100 pictures per view.
PRO Automatic crop for scans, marking of similar pictures in the page layout, unlimited pictures per view.