PhotoTaken User Guide

Your photos. Always within reach.

PhotoTaken is a desktop photo workflow app for Windows and Mac. It lets you browse folders of photos, tag and rate them, read their metadata, rename them, and ingest new images from a memory card, all in one window.

On Windows, PhotoTaken installs from PhotoTaken-Setup-<version>.exe (one-click installer, the recommended path) or from the portable PhotoTaken-<version>-windows.zip (extract anywhere, no shell integration, no admin needed). Settings live under %APPDATA%\LorMarSoft\PhotoTaken\. The installer is code-signed as LorMarSoft, LLC, so the User Account Control prompt shows our name as the publisher rather than "Unknown"; on a fresh release Windows may still show a one-time SmartScreen screen ("Windows protected your PC") until enough people have installed the download for it to be trusted, in which case click More info then Run anyway.

On Mac (Apple Silicon, macOS 12+), PhotoTaken installs from PhotoTaken-Setup-<version>.dmg (drag PhotoTaken.app onto the Applications shortcut, the recommended path) or from the portable PhotoTaken-<version>-mac-silicon.zip (extract and move the .app anywhere). Settings live under ~/Library/Application Support/LorMarSoft/PhotoTaken/. The build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so the first time you open PhotoTaken.app macOS just shows the standard "downloaded from the Internet" confirmation: click Open. There is no "unidentified developer" warning and no right-click workaround.

Either way, your settings survive across upgrades, reinstalls, and switches between distribution forms.

The toolbar logo names what you are running in its upper right: Trial, Light, or Pro.

PhotoTaken comes in two editions, Light and Pro. Pro used to be called Full. If you bought Full, you already have Pro, and your license key stays the same. Everything in this guide works in both unless marked ◆, which means the feature is part of Pro. A whole action (Print, Convert to DNG, Export) still opens in Light and shows an upgrade prompt when you try it. A single row inside a dialog that otherwise works (the Ingest backup destination, the Pro-only IPTC fields) is greyed out instead, and hovering it says which edition it belongs to.

Upgraded from Light to Pro? Your license key does not change. Open Preferences, click the License tab, and click Check for upgrade: every ◆ feature unlocks on the spot, with no restart. If you skip it, PhotoTaken re-checks quietly on its own at launch, at most once an hour, so the button is simply the fast way.

Getting Started

Starting up

When you launch PhotoTaken, a small card with the PhotoTaken logo appears right away while the app scans your favorites and reopens your folders. On a machine with many favorites or a large photo library this can take a few seconds; the card stays on screen the whole time and closes by itself the moment the main window is ready, so you always know the app is loading and don't need to launch it again.

First run

The first time you launch PhotoTaken, you'll be asked to pick one or more favorite drives or folders, typically the root of your photo library and any external drives you use. Favorites appear at the top of the Favorite Folders panel on the left.

You can change your favorites any time from the Favorites… button on the toolbar. The folder picker is multi-select, Ctrl/Cmd-click to pick several sibling folders at once, or Shift-click to pick a range. A row of Go to shortcuts at the top of the picker jumps straight to your Pictures, Desktop, Downloads, and Documents folders. On Windows these always point at the real folder even when Windows has moved your Pictures into OneDrive, so you don't have to hunt for it in the drive tree. On a Mac, a second Cloud row gives one-click jumps to iCloud Drive and to any OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box folder you've connected through macOS. These live in a hidden system location the drive tree can't reach, so without the shortcut there's no way to browse to them, iCloud Drive especially. The picker remembers where you were last browsing so the next time you add favorites it reopens at the same drive root. You can also right-click in the Favorite Folders panel and choose Add Favorite Folders… to launch the same picker without going through the toolbar.

Opening a folder

Click any folder in the Favorite Folders panel to load its images into the contact sheet. The folder is also added to the Tabs strip so you can jump back to it quickly.

The first time you open a folder, the Generating thumbnails progress bar in the status bar (bottom right) tracks the photos being decoded, with the count (for example "Generating thumbnails 300 of 1000") written just to the left of the bar. The thumbnails for the part of the grid that's on screen are built first, so a large folder fills the visible area quickly and stays responsive while the rest finish in the background; scrolling moves the photos you scroll to ahead of the ones still off screen. When you come back to a folder you've already viewed in full, its thumbnails are reused from the on-disk cache and no progress bar appears, so a revisit doesn't look like a fresh scan. If you leave a folder while it's still generating (say at 300 of 1000) and come back before it finishes, the bar picks up where it left off (300 of 1000 and counting) instead of restarting from one, so it's clear it's continuing the same job rather than starting over. The bar appears only when there are still photos that need a thumbnail, and because it lives in the status bar the photos never shift as it comes and goes.

Cloud (online-only) photos

If your photos live in a cloud folder, some may be online-only: stored in the cloud and not yet downloaded to your computer. This covers OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive on Windows, and iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive on Mac (File Explorer or Finder shows a cloud icon on them). PhotoTaken marks these with a small cloud badge and, on purpose, does not download them just to make thumbnails, so opening a big cloud folder never pulls your whole library onto your disk. The same goes for search: an online-only photo is findable by its file name right away, and by camera, lens, date, and the other details once it has been downloaded.

To work with a cloud photo, double-click it (on Windows it downloads and opens in one step; on Mac it downloads, then double-click again to open). To pull down several at once without opening them, select them, right-click, and choose Download from cloud. Photos you've set to "Always keep on this device" (or the equivalent in your cloud app) are already local and behave like any other file.

By default, cloud photos show a real preview (the thumbnail the cloud already has) with a small cloud badge in the corner, instead of just a badge, and still without downloading the file. This works on Windows (OneDrive) and on Mac for iCloud Drive and the other Apple File Provider clouds, including online-only RAW files. The one exception is Dropbox on Mac, whose online-only files are empty placeholders with nothing to preview, so those keep the plain badge until downloaded. If previews ever misbehave on your machine, turn them off under Preferences > Performance > Show previews for online-only cloud photos and you get the plain cloud badge back. On Mac, downloads happen quietly in the background with nothing popping open.

The Workspace

PhotoTaken's main window has three dockable panels surrounding the central contact sheet:

• Favorite Folders: a tree of your favorite drives and their subfolders.
• Tabs: a vertical strip of folders you currently have open.
• Metadata: EXIF and IPTC details for the currently-selected image.

Any panel can be dragged to the left or right side of the window, collapsed, or hidden. Use the matching toolbar buttons (Favorite Folders, Tabs, Metadata, Keywords) to show or hide each one, or press Ctrl/Cmd+1 through Ctrl/Cmd+4 to toggle them from the keyboard. Your layout is saved automatically and restored next launch.

Favorite Folders Panel

• Expand / collapse any folder with the arrow beside it. Expansion state is remembered between sessions.
• Right-click a folder for actions: Rename, Delete, Show in Finder / Show in Explorer (label matches the OS), and more.
• Remove a favorite by hovering its row and clicking the ✕ that appears at the right edge, then confirming. You can also right-click the favorite and choose Remove from Favorites, or open the Favorites… toolbar dialog and click Remove. Only the shortcut is removed; the folder on disk is untouched.
• Drag files from the contact sheet onto a folder to move them there. RAW+JPEG pairs move together, and any .xmp sidecar attached to a RAW (or to a JPG) is moved alongside its file so ratings, color tags, and keywords stay attached after the drop. If a file you're dropping already exists in the destination, PhotoTaken asks what to do, just like Finder: Replace the existing file, Keep Both (the incoming file is added with a numbered suffix like IMG_0001 (1).jpg, so nothing is overwritten), or Cancel the whole drop. When several files clash at once, tick Apply to all in the prompt to make one choice cover the rest instead of answering for each file.

Find Photo Folders ◆

Can't remember which drive a shoot is on? Find Photo Folders looks through the drives you choose, lists every folder that holds photos, and lets you add any of them to Favorites with one click. Open it from the Find Photo Folders… button on the toolbar (just right of Favorites…), from the button of the same name in the Favorites… dialog, or right-click in the Favorite Folders panel and choose Find Photo Folders…. Opened from the panel, the window stays open beside the app, so you can keep working while a big drive is scanned.

• Choose where to look. Click Add Drive or Folder… and pick one or more drives or folders. A place that hasn't been scanned shows (not scanned yet) after its path.
• Scan. Select a drive in the list and click Scan to scan just that one (Shift-click or Ctrl/Cmd-click to pick several). The button reads Rescan for a drive that has already been scanned. With nothing selected it scans the drives that haven't been scanned yet, and once they all have, it reads Rescan All. The status line counts folders as it goes, and Cancel Scan stops it; everything found so far is kept. The scan only reads folder listings and never opens a photo, so it doesn't download anything from the cloud.
• Search. Type any part of a folder's name or path, or the drive's name. Results appear as you type. Typing a parent folder's name finds the photo folders inside it. The list shows up to 300 folders; type more to narrow it down.
• Add to Favorites. Click Add to Favorites on a row. A folder that is already a favorite reads In Favorites.
• Camera photos only (on by default) shows only folders holding a RAW, JPEG, HEIC, or TIFF. Turn it off to also see folders that hold only PNG, GIF, PDF, video, and the other supported types.
• Tidy the list. Select rows and click Remove Selected from List (or press Delete) to take folders you don't care about out of the list. They stay out when you scan again, and nothing on disk is touched. Clear List… empties the whole list so the next scan starts fresh, bringing back anything you removed.
• Removing a drive. Select it at the top and click Remove. If it was scanned, PhotoTaken asks whether to also remove the folders found on it or keep them.

It keeps itself current. While PhotoTaken is running, it notices photos and folders being added, renamed, moved, or deleted on the drives you've scanned and updates the list on its own. Network drives are the exception: use Rescan for those, and for anything that changed while PhotoTaken was closed.

Unplugged drives are remembered. Folders on a drive that isn't connected stay in the list, grayed out, with the drive's name. Plug the drive back in and they light up again within a few seconds, even if the drive comes back under a different drive letter.

If macOS says no. The first time PhotoTaken reads an external or network drive, macOS asks for permission. If the answer was Don't Allow, the scan says so, and an Open Privacy Settings button takes you to Privacy & Security in System Settings, where you can allow PhotoTaken and scan again.

The scan skips operating system folders, application bundles, the inside of a Photos library, and a network storage box's recycle bin, since none of those hold your shoots.

Tabs Strip

The Tabs strip is a vertical list of folders you've opened, not horizontal tabs. Click a tab to switch folders. The current tab is drawn in bold so you can always see at a glance which folder is loaded; when you click a different tab, the bold moves over right away and the contact sheet shows a brief "Loading…" header while it repopulates.

• Close a tab by clicking the × on the right-hand side of the tab, pressing Ctrl/Cmd+W, or using the toolbar's Close Tab button.
• Reopen the last closed tab with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T, the Reopen Closed Tab toolbar button, or the Reopen Closed Tab entry in the Tabs panel's right-click context menu.
• Step backward and forward through your tab history with the toolbar's Back and Forward buttons, or with Alt/Option+Left / Alt/Option+Right. If your mouse has the two side buttons under the thumb, those work too. Back also resurrects tabs you've closed: if you close a folder and then hit Back, that folder reopens right where it was. The history covers folder tabs and Search Results tabs alike, but a closed Search Results tab is dropped from history (its results are session-only and can't be rebuilt).
• Reorder tabs by dragging them up or down within the strip. A drop indicator line shows where the tab will land.
• Refresh a folder's thumbnails by right-clicking its tab and choosing Refresh Thumbnails. PhotoTaken asks you to confirm, then throws away the saved thumbnails for that folder and rebuilds them from scratch, with the bar counting the whole folder again. Use it if a thumbnail ever looks wrong or out of date (for example, a photo edited in another app), or to re-check how fast a folder loads from cold.
• Refresh a folder's search results by right-clicking its tab and choosing Refresh Search Index. This re-reads that one folder from disk in the background (keywords, ratings, colors, and which files are actually there) so search catches up to changes made outside PhotoTaken, for example after you re-tag or rate photos in Lightroom, or add or remove files in Finder or Explorer. It doesn't touch your thumbnails and doesn't switch your view: the status bar shows a brief "Reindexing…" then "Search index updated," and any open Search Results tab re-runs itself. It isn't offered on Search Results tabs.

When you switch tabs, PhotoTaken remembers each tab's selected thumbnails and scroll position. Switch away to compare a folder, switch back, and you land exactly where you left off. Closing the tab clears that memory; reopening the same folder later starts at the top.

Open tabs are restored automatically the next time you launch PhotoTaken, even if the app was force-quit or crashed rather than closed normally: the list of open folders is saved in the background as it changes, so a folder you just opened (such as one an import just finished into) is never lost.

Unavailable folders are greyed, not deleted. If a favorite or open tab points at a folder that's gone (the drive was disconnected or the folder was deleted), PhotoTaken greys it out and shows a tooltip explaining why, rechecking every minute and whenever you switch back to the app. It never removes the entry on its own: reconnect the drive and it lights back up. To clear one for good, right-click a favorite and choose Remove from Favorites, or close the tab with its x.

Contact Sheet

The contact sheet is the grid of thumbnails in the middle of the window.

Thumbnail size

Use the size slider above the contact sheet to make thumbnails larger or smaller. The size dropdown to its right shows the current size (e.g. 256px) and lets you jump directly to any of the nine preset sizes (128 through 512 px). Moving the slider updates the dropdown, and picking from the dropdown moves the slider. Your choice is remembered. Changing the size re-renders the grid from the same cached thumbnails (PhotoTaken keeps one copy per photo and rescales it), so on an already-cached folder this happens without the Generating thumbnails bar appearing.

Sorting

Sort images by filename, date, or size, ascending or descending. Sort settings persist across sessions. Date sorts by the photo's capture date (when it was taken), not the file's modified date.

Display fields

The Display dropdown above the contact sheet lists three checkable options: Date, Size, and Rating. Check any combination to add those lines of caption text beneath each thumbnail. Fewer fields means a cleaner grid. Choices are remembered across sessions. The full-screen viewer and Compare use the same selection: the info bar on an opened image shows the filename plus whichever of date, size, and rating you have turned on here. For a RAW+JPEG pair the info bar shows the combo the way the tile does (for example DSC_9288.JPG/NEF), and when a File Type filter is active it accents the matching extension (so with a RAW filter on, the NEF is highlighted). Date shows the photo's capture date (the date and time it was taken, read from the photo's EXIF), falling back to the file's modified date only for files that have no capture date. The capture date is read in the background just after a folder opens, so the date may take a moment to appear the first time you open a folder.

RAW + JPEG pairing

When a folder contains a RAW file and a JPEG with the same base name (for example IMG_0001.CR2 and IMG_0001.JPG), PhotoTaken shows one tile (the JPEG) and keeps the RAW attached invisibly. Rename or move operations always keep the pair together.

If a shot has more than one RAW under the same stem, for example IMG_0001.JPG, IMG_0001.NEF, and IMG_0001.DNG after a convert-and-keep, PhotoTaken still shows a single tile for the shot. The tile's caption reads something like IMG_0001.JPG/NEF/DNG so you can see every format at a glance, and the tooltip lists the full paths. Rename, delete, tag, and undo stay in lockstep across every sibling.

Dragging a paired thumbnail out of PhotoTaken (to Explorer, Photoshop, an email, etc.) drags the JPEG by default, since that's what most external tools want. Hold Ctrl/Cmd while starting the drag to drag the RAW file instead.

When a tile has multiple RAW formats, right-click it and open the Ctrl/Cmd+drag RAW as submenu to pick which format should ship. Options include Camera-native (default) (the original format like NEF or CR2) plus a checkable entry for each RAW extension present. The choice persists across sessions, so setting it to DNG once means every subsequent Ctrl/Cmd+drag sends DNGs to Lightroom until you change it.

PhotoTaken reads 26 RAW formats: Canon (CR2, CR3, CRW), Nikon (NEF, NRW), Sony (ARW, ARQ, SR2, SRF), Fujifilm (RAF), Panasonic (RW2), Olympus / OM System (ORF), Pentax (PEF), Leica (RWL), Sigma (X3F), Samsung (SRW), Minolta (MRW), Epson (ERF), Kodak (DCR, KDC), Hasselblad (3FR, FFF), Phase One (IIQ), Leaf (MOS), Mamiya (MEF), and Adobe DNG. Extension matching is case-insensitive.

TIFF and PNG files are treated as primary deliverables in their own right, not pair members. A folder that has both IMG_0001.JPG and IMG_0001.TIF shows two tiles, not one, the TIFF (typically a Photoshop export) deserves to be visible next to its companion JPEG rather than hidden by it. The same rule applies to PNG.

WebP, AVIF, GIF, and BMP open the same way and follow the same rule: each gets its own tile even when a same-name JPEG sits beside it. Animated GIF and WebP files show their first frame. Ratings and color tags are written inside the file for WebP, AVIF, and GIF; BMP is the one exception, it has nowhere to store them, so its tags go to a small .xmp sidecar next to the file (the same thing PhotoTaken does for RAW).

HEIC / HEIF (the format iPhones and many recent cameras shoot) opens for browsing, viewing, tagging, and export. Each HEIC gets its own tile, even when a JPEG of the same name sits next to it (an iPhone often saves both), so nothing is hidden. If a HEIC instead shares a name with a RAW file, the RAW rides along on the HEIC tile, just like a RAW+JPEG pair. PhotoTaken reads HEIC but never writes it; to hand a client or lab a standard file, use Export / Convert to turn HEIC into JPEG (or PNG, TIFF, or WebP). To skip that step entirely, Ingest ◆ can convert HEIC to JPG as the photos come in, so what lands in your folder is already a JPEG.

PDF files show their first page as the tile, with a page count in the corner. Rate them, color them, rename them, and filter to them like any photo. Double-click opens the PDF in whatever viewer you normally use (Preview, Acrobat, Edge); PhotoTaken does not have a PDF reader of its own, the same way it hands a video to your usual player. PDFs are skipped by the full-screen viewer, compare, and the slideshow, and their ratings go to a small .xmp file alongside so the document itself is never rewritten.

The Metadata panel also shows Lens (identified) (a readable lens name, often friendlier than the raw one), Lens (35mm equiv), Max Aperture (how fast the lens is, as opposed to what this frame was shot at), Exp. Mode, Metering, Light Source, Altitude, and Color Space. A row stays hidden when the photo does not carry that field, so the panel does not fill up with blanks.\n\nTelling us something. Open About and click Contact Us. Pick whether it is a bug, general feedback, or a feature request, type your message, and optionally leave an email so we can reply. There is a tick box to attach your log file, which is what makes a bug diagnosable; it is off unless you turn it on, and a button shows you exactly what the log says before you send it. Your photographs are never sent. If we cannot be reached, PhotoTaken offers to open your email program instead so nothing you wrote is lost.

Adobe Photoshop PSD files also get their own tile and open full-size in the viewer, showing the flattened, saved-down preview of the file (the composite you'd see if you flattened all layers). If a PSD has no composite to show, usually because it was saved without Photoshop's Maximize Compatibility option, the tile is left empty rather than the app failing. The metadata panel reads a PSD's EXIF/IPTC like any other file. Star and color tags are written to a small .xmp sidecar next to the PSD, so the PSD itself is never rewritten and stays exactly as Photoshop saved it. PhotoTaken never edits or exports PSD content; it is a viewing and tagging format only.

Video files

Video clips appear in the contact sheet alongside your photos. Each clip shows a still poster frame, a small play icon in the middle, and its length in the corner (for example 1:23). A clip always gets its own tile, even if it shares a name with a photo.

Double-click a clip to play it in your default video player (VLC, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and so on). PhotoTaken has no built-in player; it just opens the file the way double-clicking it in Explorer or Finder would. For the same reason, video clips are skipped in the full-screen viewer, Compare, and slideshows.

You can color-label and star-rate clips exactly like photos. Those tags are saved in a small .xmp sidecar file next to the clip (the same approach used for RAW files), so the video itself is never rewritten and the tags are readable by Bridge, Lightroom, and Photo Mechanic. Rename, Ingest, drag-and-drop, and Rotate Left/Right all handle video too, and the Metadata Panel reads a clip's details. Photo-only actions, Edit IPTC Info, Edit EXIF Info, and Convert to DNG, are greyed out when a video is selected.

Supported video extensions: MP4, M4V, MOV, QT, AVI, MKV, WEBM, MTS, M2TS, TS, WMV, MPG, MPEG, M2V, 3GP, 3G2, MXF, VOB, FLV.

Filtering

Above the contact sheet, the Color, Rating, and File Type dropdowns narrow the grid to just the images you want to see:

• Color offers All (no filter), Untagged (only images with no color tag), Tagged (only images that carry a color tag, whatever the color), and each of the 17 palette colors (filters to that exact color).
• Rating offers Any, Unrated (no stars), an exactly 1 through exactly 5 entry, and a ≥1 through ≥5 threshold entry. The exact options let you isolate just-rejected or not-yet-culled shots (especially Unrated and exactly 1); the ≥ options keep the "show me the shots I'll use" workflow (for example ≥4 for your top picks).
• File Type lists the formats actually present in the open folder. A plain RAW+JPEG shoot offers All, JPEG, and RAW (any); a folder that also has DNGs from conversion adds RAW (any) plus each specific format (for example NEF and DNG). Other types (HEIC, TIFF, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, PSD, PDF, Video) appear only when present. Each specific filter shows tiles that contain that file type, including paired tiles (JPG+NEF, JPG+DNG, etc.) when the pair contains the selected format. Dragging or moving a tile under a specific type filter moves only the matching component of the pair: filtering by NEF and dragging a JPG+NEF tile moves the NEF and leaves the JPEG in place, and filtering by JPEG moves only the JPEG. Under All, pairs always move together.

With the thumbnail grid focused, press D to cycle the File Type filter forward (and Shift+D to go backward), a quick way to flip through "what file types am I Displaying" without the mouse.

The three filters combine: Color Red with Rating ≥4 and File Type RAW (any) shows only 4-and-5-star red-tagged shots that have a RAW.

Color Tags & Star Ratings

Assign a color tag or a star rating (0-5) to any image to mark it for later. Tags and ratings appear as small overlays on the thumbnail.

Tags and ratings are stored using the standard industry-wide XMP fields, so they travel with your photos into Lightroom, Bridge, Photo Mechanic, and anything else that speaks XMP:

• Rating is written as xmp:Rating (0-5 integer).
• Color tag is written as xmp:Label with the verbatim PhotoTaken color name. PhotoTaken ships with a 17-color palette: Red, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Cyan, Sky Blue, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Purple, Pink, Magenta, Brown, White, Gray.

Heads-up if you use Lightroom or Bridge: Adobe apps only recognize five color labels by default, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple. Those five show up as colored swatches in Lightroom. The other twelve PhotoTaken colors still travel with the file (the label name is stored intact in xmp:Label), but Lightroom shows them as a plain custom-label name instead of a color swatch unless you add matching names to its Metadata > Color Label Set. Nothing is lost, but if you need your colors to read as colors in a stock Adobe setup, stick to the five standard ones. Photo Mechanic, where you can name all eight color classes, handles the extras more gracefully.

Wherever a color appears in a menu or filter dropdown, its keyboard shortcut letter shows in parentheses, for example Red (R), Cyan (X), Sky Blue (S), so you can learn the muscle-memory key by reading the menu. Hover any toolbar button and its tooltip shows the matching keyboard shortcut as well.

Auto-advance while culling. Turn on "Advance to the next photo after applying a color or rating" under Preferences > Thumbnails > Culling and pressing any rating key (0-5) or any color key (including the color-clear backslash) jumps the selection to the next photo automatically, so you can rate a whole shoot key by key. This only fires when exactly one photo is selected; multi-select never auto-advances. It works in both the thumbnail grid and the fullscreen viewer (single-image mode only; compare mode and slideshow never auto-advance). The advance stops on the last visible photo and does not wrap. Filter-hidden tiles are skipped in the grid. Off by default.

You don't have to open Preferences to switch this on and off: press U in the grid or the viewer to toggle it, with a brief on-screen confirmation. The U key flips the same setting, so the Preferences checkbox always matches.

Undo a rating or color change. Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z to undo the most recent color or rating change. If you changed a multi-select batch, the whole batch reverts together in a single press. This is the same undo history used for deleting a photo (see Deleting Images below), so Ctrl/Cmd+Z always reverts whichever action happened most recently, tag or delete, and you can keep pressing it to step back through your last ~50 actions this session. It works the same way in the thumbnail grid and in the full-screen viewer.

Where the XMP lives depends on the file type:

• JPEG, TIFF, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF: XMP is written inside the file itself, so there's no extra file to manage.
• BMP: written to an adjacent sidecar file. BMP is an old format with no place inside it to keep metadata, so this is the only way the tags can travel with the picture.
• PDF: also written to an adjacent sidecar file. PhotoTaken never rewrites a document, so the PDF you rated is byte-for-byte the one you had.
• Every RAW format, including DNG: XMP is written to an adjacent sidecar file, because writing into the RAW container itself isn't safe. DNG can carry XMP internally, but rewriting a 30-50 MB DNG every time you change a keyword is brutal on USB and external drives, so PhotoTaken treats DNG the same way Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge do, with a small sidecar alongside the file. If a DNG you tagged in an older version of PhotoTaken doesn't have a sidecar yet, PhotoTaken still reads the embedded XMP so your existing keywords and ratings stay visible; the next time you edit that DNG a sidecar is created.

Sidecar naming (important if you use Lightroom). There are two common ways to name a RAW's sidecar, and you choose which under Preferences > Files > RAW Sidecars:

• Standard (IMG_0001.xmp, the default): the extension is replaced with .xmp. This is the form Adobe Lightroom, Bridge, Camera Raw, and Capture One read, so your star ratings, color labels, and keywords show up when you import the RAW into those tools.
• Photo Mechanic style (IMG_0001.ARW.xmp): the full filename is kept and .xmp is appended. This is the form Photo Mechanic and other ExifTool-based tools read. Lightroom does not read this form, so choose it only if your workflow is built around Photo Mechanic. (The .ARW here is just an example, Sony's RAW extension; your camera's files use their own, such as .CR3, .NEF, or .RAF, and the sidecar matches whatever yours is.)

PhotoTaken reads either form, no matter which you've selected, so switching the setting never hides tags you've already written. When you change the setting, a file's existing sidecar is renamed to the form you picked the next time you tag it (so you never end up with two sidecars for one file).

If you duplicate a RAW + sidecar pair via Windows Explorer (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V), Windows produces an orphan sidecar named like IMG_0001.NEF - Copy.xmp instead of the expected IMG_0001 - Copy.NEF.xmp. PhotoTaken automatically detects that pattern and reads the orphan sidecar, then renames it to the standard form the next time you change a tag, no manual cleanup needed.

Embedded copyright is carried into the sidecar. Many photographers set a copyright, creator, or caption in-camera, so it lives inside the RAW itself. The first time PhotoTaken creates a sidecar for a RAW, it copies that embedded copyright, creator, caption, and any keywords into the new sidecar before adding your rating or label. That way, once Lightroom reads the sidecar, it still sees your copyright instead of a blank, so your rights information travels with the file rather than being dropped. Sidecars you created in an earlier version are left as-is.

When reading tags, PhotoTaken also recognizes a small set of legacy tagger label names (e.g. Winner → Red, Trash → Purple) and maps them to the closest PhotoTaken color as a one-way import. PhotoTaken always writes back the PhotoTaken name, never the legacy label.

Because tags live in XMP, backing up or moving your photo folders elsewhere preserves all your ratings and color labels automatically.

Metadata Panel

Select an image in the contact sheet to see its full metadata on the right. The panel is organized into three sections; click a section header to collapse or expand it. Empty rows are hidden, so you only see fields actually present in the file.

File (always visible)

• Filename
• Pixel dimensions (width × height in the photo's displayed orientation: portrait shots are shown swapped from the raw sensor pair so the values match what you see)
• DPI / resolution
• ICC profile / color space
• Quality (fine/normal/RAW type)

Camera & Capture (collapsible; collapse state is remembered across sessions)

• Date and time of capture
• Latitude / longitude (if the camera recorded GPS); both fields are clickable links that open the coordinate in Google Maps in your default browser
• Make and model
• Serial number
• Firmware / software version
• Frame / shutter count
• Lens model
• Focal length (mm)
• ISO
• Aperture (f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• Exposure compensation (EV)
• Flash exposure compensation
• Exposure program / mode
• Focus mode
• White balance
• Contrast setting
• Sharpening setting

IPTC / Description (collapsible; defaults to expanded when the file has IPTC data and collapsed when it doesn't, and manual toggling sticks until you switch to a different file)

• Creator (plus Creator email, phone, and website)
• Credit
• Source
• Rights Usage
• Headline
• Caption (editable inline): written to IPTC Caption-Abstract, EXIF ImageDescription, and XMP Description so it's portable across tools.
• Copyright (editable inline): written to EXIF Copyright, IPTC CopyrightNotice, and XMP Rights.
• Instructions
• City, Sublocation, State / Province, Country
• Keywords

Edit Caption or Copyright and click Save Caption / Copyright. PhotoTaken uses ExifTool's -overwrite_original mode, so writes update the same file without leaving a _original backup.

For the full IPTC field set (creator contact info, credit, source, headline, instructions, keywords, location, etc.), use the Edit IPTC Info… dialog (Ctrl/Cmd+I), see the next section.

Metadata reads happen on a background thread so opening a large RAW won't stall the UI. You'll see the filename immediately and the rest of the fields populate as soon as ExifTool returns.

If the panel instead shows an "ExifTool not found" message with a link to exiftool.org, see Troubleshooting.

Keywords Panel

Your own tree of keywords, so they stay spelled one way and you stop retyping them. Press Ctrl/Cmd+4, click the Keywords button at the end of the toolbar, or turn it on in Preferences → Panels. It starts hidden and empty, because the tree is yours to build.

Building the tree

Right-click to add a word. With one selected you can add another under it or alongside it, so Animals holds Birds, and Birds holds Owl. The Add, Rename and Delete buttons at the bottom do the same.

Nesting is not filing for its own sake: a word's position is what lets one click tag a photo with the whole branch.

Two words in the same place cannot share a name, capitals aside, so you cannot end up with both Egret and egret side by side. Renaming a word carries everything under it along. Deleting asks first and says how many words are underneath, and it changes your list only: keywords already written into photos are left alone.

Tagging photos ◆

Select some photos and every row grows a checkbox:

• Ticked, every selected photo has that word.
• A dash, some do.
• Empty, none do.

Click an empty box and the word goes on, along with everything above it. Ticking Owl under Animals > Birds writes all three words, so a later search for "birds" finds the photo even though you never typed that word. Hold Shift while clicking to write the single word instead.

Unticking takes off only the word you clicked. Animals and Birds stay, because another photo in the selection may still need them.

PhotoTaken writes the plain keywords every program reads, plus the hierarchy Lightroom uses, so importing there rebuilds your tree instead of dumping unrelated words. Writing happens in the background; if a file cannot be written, PhotoTaken says which ones.

Tagging is Pro. Browsing, filtering, counts and search work on Light.

Ungrouped

Any keyword on the selected photos that is not in your tree appears under Ungrouped at the bottom. On a library you have been keywording for years, that is where all of it turns up the first time you open the panel. Add the same word to your tree and it moves out.

Finding things

Type in the Filter box to narrow the tree; matches stay along with the branches they hang from, and everything opens so nothing hides collapsed.

The number on the right of a row is how many photos in your search index carry that word. It counts the word itself, so an Owl under Animals > Birds and an Owl filed elsewhere share one number, and only folders you have opened are counted.

Hover a row and the number gives way to an arrow. Click it to search for that word. It runs a keyword: search, so you get the photos you actually filed under it rather than every file whose name or caption mentions it.

Past 500 selected photos the checkboxes are worked out from the first 500 (the panel says so), but ticking one still applies the keyword to every photo you selected.

Rename

Single-file rename

Right-click a thumbnail and choose Rename… to open the simple rename prompt. Type the new name and press OK; the extension is preserved automatically. RAW+JPEG pairs always rename in lockstep, if one side of a pair can't be renamed (for example, because the new name collides), the whole pair is rolled back so you never end up half-renamed. XMP sidecar files (the .xmp companion next to a RAW) are renamed along with their files so your ratings, labels, and keywords stay attached.

When you're sorting by Name or Type, the renamed tile jumps to its correct sorted position the moment you press OK (rename a bottom-of-the-grid shot to something starting with "A" and it moves to the top), and it stays selected and scrolled into view. Other sort orders (Date, Size, Rating) are unaffected by a name change, so the tile keeps its place.

Batch rename with templates ◆

Select two or more thumbnails, right-click, and choose Batch Rename… to open the template-driven batch rename dialog. Type a template string using the tokens listed below; a live preview table shows the old and new names for every selected file as you type. Press Rename to apply. The dialog opens immediately with the file list shown; on a large selection a progress bar appears briefly while PhotoTaken reads each photo's shooting information, after which the template box becomes active.

Presets and quick-add buttons. You don't have to know the token codes. Pick a ready-made recipe from the Start with dropdown (for example Subject + Date + Number) and the template fills in for you; the preview shows the result right away. Recipes that include a subject drop in the word ShootName as a placeholder, just type over it with your shoot or place name (e.g. Smith-Wedding). Below the dropdown is a row of quick-add buttons with plain-language labels (Date YYYYMMDD, Sequence #, Camera, and more): click one to drop that piece into the template at your cursor. There is also a Time group (Time HH-MM-SS, Time HHMMSS, Time HH-MM) for the time a shot was taken, and a Date + Time + Number preset that builds a guaranteed-unique name like 20260624 173205 0001. The raw template box stays editable the whole time, so you can still type codes by hand if you prefer; the dropdown shows Custom... once you do.

Adjustments. A template handles the start and end of a name (a prefix or suffix wrapped around {stem}); the optional Adjustments panel below the template field reaches inside it. Tick Adjustments to expand it, then arm any of these, applied top to bottom: Insert text at a character position, Remove a run of characters, Replace a run of characters with new text, Find one piece of text and replace it, Change case (UPPER, lower, Title, or Sentence), and Clean up spacing (collapse and trim spaces, optionally turning them into underscores or dashes). Each position counts characters from 1 (position 1 is the first character), from the start or the end of the name, and the preview updates as you go.

Hand-editing a single name. Double-click any row in the preview's New name column to type a name for that one file. A hand-edited row is shown in bold and stays pinned even if you change the template or an adjustment afterward; clear the cell to release it back to the generated name.

PhotoTaken applies the rename in two passes using unique temporary names, so templates that produce cyclic targets (e.g. shifting every file by one, IMG_0001 → IMG_0002, IMG_0002 → IMG_0003) work cleanly with no mid-rename collisions. XMP sidecars are renamed along with their files in the same two-pass scheme. If a rename cannot be completed (a drive disconnects mid-way, a file turns read-only), every file is put back under its original name rather than left half-renamed.

Undoing a rename

Changed your mind? Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z to put the files back under their original names. This works for a single rename and for a whole batch, however many files it touched, and the status bar reminds you right after a batch rename. Paired RAW files and .xmp sidecars come back too, and your color tags and star ratings follow the files, so nothing is stranded on the old name.

This is the same shared undo history used for deletes and tag changes (see Color Tags & Star Ratings above), so pressing Ctrl/Cmd+Z repeatedly steps back through your recent actions in the order you made them. It lasts until you close PhotoTaken.

If something changed in between, say you deleted one of the renamed photos, or a new file has taken one of the old names, PhotoTaken restores everything it safely can and shows you a short list of what it skipped and why.

Template tokens

The same tokens work in the batch rename dialog and in the Ingest subfolder field.

Capture date comes from EXIF DateTimeOriginal when available, falling back to the file's modification time. Illegal filename characters (\\, /, :, *, ?, ", <, >, |) are stripped from the rendered output automatically, you can use {exif:camera} even if your camera model contains a colon.

Example templates:

• {date:yyyymmdd}_{seq:4} → 20260414_0001, 20260414_0002, …
• {date:yyyymmdd}_{time:HHMMSS}_{seq:4} → 20260414_173205_0001, … (date + time + number)
• {stem}_pick → IMG_0001_pick, IMG_0002_pick, …
• {exif:camera}-{seq} → X-T5-1, X-T5-2, …

RAW+JPEG pairs are always renamed together, the template is applied once to the pair and the RAW sibling picks up the same stem.

Ingest

Click Ingest on the toolbar to copy images from an SD card or external drive into your library.

• Choose a source drive and a destination folder. The Source field remembers the last source you used (most photographers re-import from the same card or staging drive). The Destination field defaults to whichever folder you have open in PhotoTaken when you click Ingest, so "into this folder" is one click away; if no folder is open it falls back to the last destination you used.
• A Destination that doesn't exist yet. Type a new folder into Destination and click Start: if the folder it would go in exists, PhotoTaken asks Create folder? and names it. Yes creates the folder and the import goes ahead; No creates nothing. If the folder above it is missing too, there's no question, just "Destination folder is not valid.", since that's more likely a typo.
• The Browse buttons next to Source, Destination, and Backup destination open PhotoTaken's own folder picker instead of the system's native one. On macOS the native picker hides /Volumes by default, which is exactly where external drives, SD cards, and network shares mount; the custom picker reveals them so every connected drive is reachable. The picker also has a path bar at the top, type or paste a path and press Enter to jump there directly.
• Optionally set a Backup destination ◆ on a second drive, every file is copied to both locations and a file only counts as ingested when both copies land intact. If the backup drive fails for any reason, the primary copy is rolled back so you never end up thinking you have a backup when you don't. Use this for any shoot you can't re-shoot.
• The optional subfolder field accepts template tokens, e.g. {date:yyyy-mm-dd} creates 2026-04-14 automatically from the shoot's capture date. The template is resolved against the earliest source file on the card. See the Rename section for the full token list.
• The Destination and Backup destination pickers also have a New Folder… button. Click any folder in the tree (or type a path in the box at the top), then click New Folder… to create a subfolder inside it without leaving PhotoTaken. The new folder is selected automatically, so OK is one click away.
• PhotoTaken copies the files (originals stay on the card), handles RAW+JPEG pairs as a unit, and opens the destination folder automatically when the copy finishes.
• A live thumbnail strip below the progress bar fills in as each file finishes copying, so you can see images landing in real time and confirm the right card is being read.
• Import again without closing. When a copy finishes (or you cancel it, or it fails), Start comes back on and the Cancel button becomes Close. Change anything you like and click Start for another import; the summary and the thumbnail strip from the last one stay up until you do. Files already in the destination are skipped (see below). For a phone or the Photos library, the dates jump to Since last import after a run that brings something in, and Start checks the source again, so the next Start brings in only what's new since. A run that brings nothing new in leaves the dates you picked alone. Close closes the dialog.
• The source and primary destination are remembered between sessions so you only pick them once per workflow. The backup destination is not remembered: it starts blank on every ingest, so a copy never silently piles into a backup folder you set up once and forgot. Pick a backup deliberately when you want one.
• Optionally pick a Stationery Pad ◆ from the dropdown to stamp metadata (creator, copyright, credit, keywords, etc.) onto every file as it's copied, pads are applied to both the primary and backup copies. See the Stationery Pads section below.
• Optionally tick Convert HEIC to JPG ◆ to turn iPhone photos into ordinary JPEGs as they come in, instead of importing them and converting them afterwards. Capture date, camera, lens, and GPS all come across, and the phone's color profile is kept as it was, so colors don't shift. Set the Quality (50 to 100; 92 is the default and is close to the best the format offers without the file size that the very top costs). Tick Also copy the HEIC if you want the original alongside the JPEG; leave it unticked and only the JPEG lands in your folder. Either way nothing is deleted from the card, so the originals are still there until you erase it yourself.
• If a photo already has a JPG sitting next to the HEIC on the card (some phones save both), that one is left alone and copied as-is, since it would otherwise fight the existing JPEG for the same name. The status line tells you how many that happened to.
• Re-importing a card you already converted is still safe: PhotoTaken matches the JPEG in your folder to the HEIC on the card by capture time and skips it, so you don't end up with a second copy.
• Optionally tick Filter by capture time to restrict the import to a date and time range. The From and To rows each have a separate date picker and time picker; time uses 12-hour AM/PM format. By default the window covers all of today (12:00 AM through 11:59 PM), so ticking the box without touching the pickers ingests only today's shoot. Files outside the inclusive window are skipped; the default unchecked state ingests everything. RAW+JPEG pairs stay together, so if either file in a pair lands inside the window the whole pair is copied.
• Import from an iPhone or Android phone. Plug the phone in, unlock it, and click Phone… next to the Source box. The dialog shows how many photos are on the phone and their date span. Photos come in by default; tick Include videos or Include screenshots and other images to add those. The first time, tick the capture time filter and pick a start date. After that the dialog opens on Since last import, and moves there again after a run that brings something in, so only what's new comes in; pick your own dates to import a different range. Convert HEIC to JPG ◆ works here too. Nothing is ever deleted from the phone. On Android, tap the "Charging this device via USB" notification and choose a transfer mode (on the Mac, choose Photo & Video transfer); a cable that only charges won't show the phone at all. On Windows the same Phone… button works: Windows reads a phone slowly the first time (several minutes on a big iPhone, with the status line counting folders and files found, for example "Reading your phone… 34 of 118 folders, 3,582 files") and much faster after that, and on Android either Photo & Video transfer or File transfer works: Photo & Video transfer shows only the camera's photos and videos, while File transfer shows the phone's whole storage, so photos in Download, Pictures, and similar folders come in too (apps' private data folders are skipped). An iPhone hands Windows JPG or HEIC depending on its Transfer to Mac or PC setting and the photo, and Convert HEIC to JPG handles any HEICs that arrive.
• Import from the Apple Photos library (Mac). Click Photos… next to the Source box; macOS asks once whether PhotoTaken may read your library. Pick an album (or All Photos) and a date range, and the originals land in your folder. Tick Import the edited version when there is one to get your Photos edits instead. Photos that live only in iCloud download as they come, with progress shown. With iCloud Photos on, this is every picture your iPhone has taken, so it's the easy route when the phone isn't handy; Phone… is for what's on the device right now. Nothing in the Photos library is ever changed, and your ratings and colors go into the imported files, not back into Photos. Importing the same range again is safe: photos, videos, and Live Photos already in your folder are skipped rather than copied as _2.
• Messages that need your attention stand out. When a phone (Mac or Windows) or the Photos library (Mac only) needs you to do something (no phone found, unlock the phone, the phone reported an error, the phone was disconnected, the phone stopped sending photos and the run stopped, Photos access refused, a library that can't be read), the message shows in a highlighted amber banner with a ⚠ just above the status line, not only in the status line. It goes away once that's sorted out or the next run starts.
• macOS sidecar files (._FILENAME) are skipped automatically. When a card is mounted on a Mac, macOS quietly writes hidden companion files alongside each photo to hold extended attributes the FAT/exFAT card filesystem can't store natively. They're invisible in Finder but show up in many third-party tools as "duplicate" thumbnails. PhotoTaken's importer and contact sheet ignore them on both platforms, so you'll never see them in the grid and they won't end up on your destination drive.
• Re-importing the same card is safe. If you import a card and later run Ingest again with the same card into the same folder, PhotoTaken recognizes the photos that are already there (same name and same file size) and skips them rather than making a second copy named IMG_1234_2. The summary at the end reports them as "skipped." If a different photo happens to share a name with one already in the folder, it is kept under a ..._2 name instead, so nothing you already have is ever overwritten.
• Ratings and labels travel with your photos. XMP sidecar files (.xmp), the companion files that hold star ratings, color labels, and keywords (and the only home for that information on RAW files), are copied in alongside each photo. If you rated or labeled shots on the camera or in another tool, that work comes across with the import instead of being left on the card. A sidecar stays glued to its photo even if the photo's name changes to avoid a clash, and a sidecar with no matching photo is still copied so nothing is lost.

Drag and drop from Finder or Explorer

You don't have to open the Ingest dialog manually. Drag a folder, an individual file, or a hand-picked selection of files from Finder (Mac) or Windows Explorer onto any of these PhotoTaken surfaces:

• The thumbnail grid, drops use the currently-displayed folder as the destination.
• A tab in the Tabs strip, drops use that tab's folder as the destination.
• A folder in the Favorites tree, drops use that folder as the destination.

In each case, the Ingest dialog opens with Source and Destination already filled in, so you get the same progress bar, live thumbnail strip, optional Stationery Pad, optional backup destination, and Cancel button as a manual ingest. Click Start to copy. Cancel at any time leaves whatever has already finished on disk and stops further work.

• Drop a folder → the importer recurses into it (same as picking that folder via Browse).
• Drop one or more files → only those exact files are imported, even if their parent folder contains many more. This is the right way to grab a hand-picked subset off a card without copying the rest.
• Mixed drops (folders + files at once) are treated as a file-list drop; nested folders inside a multi-item selection are ignored.

Edit IPTC Info

The Edit IPTC Info… dialog (toolbar button, thumbnail right-click menu, or Ctrl/Cmd+I) is the direct editor for the full IPTC field set on one or many selected photos. It's the place to add shot-specific metadata that doesn't belong in a reusable Stationery Pad: the wedding's actual headline, the city you really shot in, the specific instructions for a delivery.

In the Light edition, this dialog opens with only Copyright and Caption editable; the other fields are shown but greyed out. Pro unlocks the whole field set below.

Fields

The dialog edits the same field set as Stationery Pads: creator + contact info, copyright, rights usage, credit, source, headline, caption, instructions, keywords, and location (city, sublocation, state/province, country).

Single-file vs. multi-file editing

• With one file selected, every field loads with that file's current value. Edit what you want to change; leave the rest alone.
• With multiple files selected, each field loads with the common value if every file agrees. If the files disagree, the field shows a muted <multiple values> placeholder. Leave the placeholder alone to preserve each file's own distinct value, or type over it to force every file to the same thing.

Save semantics

Only fields you actually edit are written. Untouched fields are skipped completely, no accidental overwrites. A field you explicitly empty (value was "© 2025", you delete it) is saved as empty so exiftool clears it on the file.

Writes happen one file at a time on a background thread, behind a Saving IPTC Info… progress dialog that blocks the window until every file is written. The progress bar shows N of M so you can see exactly how far the save has gotten; Cancel stops after the current file finishes (any files not yet written are reported as failed so you can decide what to do with them). Blocking the UI during the save is intentional, without it, starting a search mid-save could miss files whose keywords haven't been written yet. If exiftool can't save one or more files (usually because another app has them open), a Some files didn't save dialog lists the affected files and offers an inline Retry button.

When to use it vs. a Stationery Pad

• Stationery Pad, reusable template for fields you set the same way on every shoot (creator, copyright, credit).
• Edit IPTC Info, one-off per-shoot or per-photo edits on top of that baseline (headline, caption, city).

The two cooperate: pads set the baseline, Edit IPTC Info handles overrides.

Edit EXIF Info ◆

The Edit EXIF Info… dialog (toolbar button, thumbnail right-click menu, or Ctrl/Cmd+E) edits the capture-level EXIF fields that are most useful to correct when combining images from the same shoot: date/time, lens, and GPS coordinates.

Fields

• Date/Time Taken, the EXIF:DateTimeOriginal and EXIF:CreateDate timestamps. Useful when a camera body had the wrong clock, or when you are stamping scans with the actual shoot date. Format: YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS (colons in the date part are also accepted).
• Lens, the EXIF:LensModel tag. Useful for manual lenses, adapted lenses, or when the camera body did not record the lens name.
• GPS Latitude / GPS Longitude, the EXIF GPS coordinate tags. Enter decimal degrees (positive = North / East, negative = South / West). You may append a direction letter, e.g. 40.71280 N or -74.00600.

Multi-file editing

Works identically to the IPTC editor: fields start with the common value across the selection, or show <multiple values> when files disagree. Leave the placeholder to preserve each file's own value; type over it to set every file to the same thing.

Save semantics

Only fields you actually edit are written. Invalid values (malformed date, non-numeric GPS) are rejected before save with an inline error message. Writes happen one file at a time behind a progress dialog that shows Cancel support and an inline Retry button if any file fails.

The Keywords box suggests as you type

Start typing and PhotoTaken offers words you have used before: your keyword tree first, then every keyword already on photos it has indexed, so it works even before you have built a tree.

Suggestions match anywhere in a word, not just the start, so owl offers both Barn Owl and Snowy Owl. The box holds a comma-separated list, and the suggestion completes the word you are typing without disturbing the ones before it. The Stationery Pad editor's Keywords box works the same way.

Stationery Pads ◆

A Stationery Pad is a named, reusable set of IPTC metadata fields, creator, copyright, credit, caption, keywords, location, and so on. Create one per typical shoot (e.g. "Wedding default", "Editorial") and stamp it onto an entire selection or every file in an ingest with one click. No more retyping the same creator and copyright on every shoot.

Managing pads

Click Manage Stationery Pads… on the toolbar to open the pad manager.

• New… creates a pad. Give it a name and fill in the fields you want it to set.
• Edit… opens the currently selected pad for changes. You can rename it here too.
• Duplicate copies the selected pad under a new name, handy for making a variation ("Wedding, venue B").
• Remove deletes a pad after confirmation.

Fields you can set on a pad:

• Creator, Creator email, Creator phone, Creator website
• Copyright, Rights usage
• Credit, Source
• Headline, Caption, Instructions
• Keywords, comma-separated; PhotoTaken trims whitespace, drops blanks, and removes case-insensitive duplicates
• City, Sublocation, State/Province, Country

Pads are stored in your PhotoTaken settings file, so they survive app restarts and travel with your user profile.

Applying a pad to a selection

1. Select one or more files in the contact sheet.
2. Click Apply Stationery Pad… on the toolbar, or right-click any thumbnail and choose Apply Stationery Pad… from the context menu.
3. Pick a pad from the dropdown and click Apply.

PhotoTaken writes the pad's fields to each selected file on a background thread, so the UI stays responsive even on very large selections. RAW files get their pad written to the adjacent .xmp sidecar; JPEG, TIFF, and PNG files get the fields embedded directly. A status-bar message reports the result when the write finishes; if some files couldn't be stamped you'll get a warning listing them.

Empty fields don't overwrite

This is the key to layering pads safely. Only fields you actually filled in on the pad are written to the file, anything you left blank is left alone on the file. That means you can:

• Apply a default creator/copyright pad to every shoot on ingest, then
• Apply a shoot-specific pad (with just caption + city) to the delivered selects,

and the shoot-specific pad will add its fields without clobbering the creator and copyright from the first pad. Keywords are added, not replaced, so each pad's keyword list is appended to whatever the file already has.

Applying a pad on ingest

The Ingest dialog has an Apply Stationery Pad dropdown. Pick a pad there and every file will be stamped as it lands on disk, with no second step needed. The dropdown always starts on (none): a pad is applied only when you pick one for that import, never carried over silently from a previous ingest. (When a pad is chosen, photos get it embedded and videos get it written to a .xmp sidecar.)

Single Image View

To see a single photo at full size, select it in the contact sheet and either double-click it or press Enter. The viewer opens on that one image so you can inspect focus, check expressions, read signage, etc. A small info bar across the bottom shows the filename plus the image's current color tag and star rating.

Navigation inside the viewer:

• Left / Right arrow or mouse wheel: previous / next photo, walking the current folder in its sort order. Scrolling the wheel down moves to the next photo and scrolling up goes back, the same on Windows and Mac.
• Esc (or the close button), return to the contact sheet. If you browsed to a different photo, the grid follows you and selects the one you ended on. If you closed on a photo that was already selected, your selection comes back untouched.

The filmstrip

Move the mouse toward the bottom of the viewer and a strip of thumbnails slides up, showing the photos on either side of the one you're looking at. Click any thumbnail to jump straight to it. Move the mouse back up and the strip slides away again.

Each thumbnail carries the same marks as the contact sheet: a color bar along the bottom and the star count in the corner, so you can see what you've already tagged without leaving the image. The photo you're on has a white border.

• ** (backtick, the key just left of **1**) pins the strip open so it stays up while you work, and pins it away again. PhotoTaken remembers which way you left it. A small reminder appears at the right-hand end of the strip each time it comes up, reading ** (backtick) pin or ` (backtick) unpin depending on which way the key will go, and it fades after a few seconds.
• Mouse wheel over the strip scrolls it sideways. Over the picture, the wheel still moves to the previous or next photo as usual.

The strip is there in single-image view only. Compare mode is already tight on space, and a slideshow is meant to be a clean presentation, so neither one shows it.

Zooming the image

The viewer zooms gradually: each + press grows the image by about 15% and each - press shrinks it by the same amount, animating smoothly to the new size. The current zoom appears on the right side of the bottom info bar whenever you're not at Fit. Z, Ctrl/Cmd+0, and Ctrl/Cmd+1 snap to the exact levels you want without animation.

• Z toggles between Fit and 1:1. Press once to jump into 1:1 for a focus check, again to come back out.
• + / = zooms in gradually. - zooms out gradually. Hold or tap repeatedly to glide in or out. Zoom out clamps at Fit (the image always fits in the viewport at minimum); zoom in clamps at 11:1.
• Ctrl/Cmd+0 snaps to Fit. Ctrl/Cmd+1 snaps to 1:1.
• Ctrl/Cmd + mouse wheel zooms in / out, same as in Photoshop and Lightroom. The zoom centers on the cursor: whatever point of the image is under the mouse stays under the mouse as the image grows or shrinks, so you can dial straight in on a face or a detail without panning afterward. While you hold Ctrl/Cmd the cursor turns into a crosshair-in-a-circle so you can see exactly where the zoom will aim.
• Click and drag when zoomed in past Fit pans the image around the viewport.
• Left / Right arrow always moves to the previous or next photo, even when you're zoomed in. Combined with the carry-zoom behavior, you can hold 1:1 across a burst and arrow through frames doing a focus check on each one.
• Ctrl/Cmd+arrow pans the image when you're zoomed in (Up / Down / Left / Right). At Fit, Ctrl/Cmd+arrow is a no-op. Click and drag works too if you'd rather pan with the mouse.

When you navigate to a new image the zoom (and pan position) carries over, so you can hold 1:1 across a burst sequence and focus-check each frame in turn without re-pressing Z every time. Press Ctrl/Cmd+0 (or Z twice) when you want to drop back to Fit.

When you cross 1:1, PhotoTaken reads the original file in the background and swaps in the full-resolution pixels so the view at 1:1 and above is genuinely sharp. This is on by default. The full-resolution swap happens every time you land on a zoomed-in frame, including when you scroll forward and then back to a photo you already looked at, so a back-and-forth comparison always shows sharp pixels on both frames. If you'd rather skip the brief re-decode pause and live with a slightly soft upscale, turn off Preferences > Viewer > Re-decode at full resolution when zooming past 1:1.

Overview navigator

When you're zoomed in past Fit, a small thumbnail of the whole frame appears in the top-right corner of the viewer. A bright rectangle on it marks the part you're currently looking at. It's there so you can keep your bearings while pixel-peeking: judge the overall composition, and spot anything happening outside the zoomed-in area (a second subject entering or leaving the frame, for instance) without zooming back out.

• Click anywhere in the overview to jump the view to that spot.
• Click and drag inside the overview to scrub the visible region around the frame, handy for following a subject from one side of the frame to the other while staying zoomed in.

The overview only shows while you're zoomed in; at Fit, where the whole frame is already visible, it stays hidden. To turn it off entirely, uncheck Preferences > Viewer > Show overview navigator when zoomed in.

Focus and exposure tools

While reviewing a photo at full size, three keys turn on overlays that help you judge a frame without leaving the viewer:

• F toggles focus peaking: a colored highlight on the parts of the image that are in sharp focus. Glance at it to confirm critical focus (the eye on a portrait or a bird) across a burst without zooming to 1:1 on every frame.
• E toggles exposure clipping warnings: blown highlights are flagged in red and crushed shadows in blue, so you can spot a frame that lost detail at a glance.
• H toggles a small histogram in the top-left corner (luminance plus red, green, and blue).

These read the on-screen preview, so they are a fast triage aid rather than a precise read of the raw file. Sensitivity for peaking and the clipping thresholds live under Preferences > Viewer. In Compare, the overlays apply to both panes.

The same three keys work on the contact sheet too, so you can judge focus and exposure straight from the grid without opening each frame. Click into the grid and press F, E, or H to overlay focus peaking, exposure clipping, or a histogram on the thumbnails (the histogram fills each tile, so toggle it off to see the photos again). The grid toggles are independent of the viewer's, use the same thresholds and colors, and reset to off when you restart. To keep the grid fast, only the thumbnails you can see are analyzed, and each result is remembered so scrolling back is instant. On the grid these read the thumbnail, so for a RAW file it's the camera's embedded preview rather than the raw sensor data, plenty for an at-a-glance check.

For RAW files, Preferences > Viewer > Focus & Exposure Overlays has a Read actual RAW sensor data (slower) checkbox: these three tools decode the real demosaiced RAW instead of the embedded preview, for a truer exposure read. It's on by default now, since the half-size decode is fast enough; uncheck it for the lightest preview-based triage. When you shoot RAW+JPEG, the tile shows the JPEG but this reads the RAW half of the pair, so the exposure check is honest on paired shots too. The same group has color pickers for the overlays: the Focus peaking color and, for exposure clipping, separate highlight (blown) and shadow (crushed) colors, so you can change them from the defaults (red peaking, red highlights, blue shadows) to whatever stands out against your subject.

Tagging from the viewer

Right-click the image for a popup menu with a Color Tag submenu and a Star Rating submenu, or use the same keyboard shortcuts as the contact sheet, press 1-5 to set a star rating (0 clears it), the matching letter key to set a color tag (R, O, Y, L, G, T, X, S, B, I, V, P, K, M, N, W, A, same letters shown in parentheses on every menu), or \ to clear the color. This lets you cull through full-size images and tag as you go without dropping back to the grid. Changes sync to the contact sheet thumbnail and to XMP on disk in real time. Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z to undo a tag change made here, it reverts on the same shared undo history as the grid, and the viewer's info bar and the contact sheet tile both update immediately.

Printing from the viewer ◆

Press Ctrl/Cmd+P (or right-click the image and choose Print...) to open the Print Image dialog for the currently-displayed photo. You can also print from the contact sheet using Ctrl/Cmd+P when any image is highlighted.

The dialog gives you:

• Orientation (Auto, Portrait, or Landscape). Auto picks portrait or landscape based on the image's own aspect ratio.
• Size: Fit to page (default, scales the image to fill the page while keeping its aspect ratio) or Actual size (prints at the image's native pixel resolution and clips if it overflows).
• Show filename below image: an optional caption strip at the bottom of the page.
• Preview...: opens a live, zoomable Print Preview window. The preview re-renders automatically as you change orientation, size, or the caption toggle, so you can see exactly what will hit paper before you commit. Click Print inside the preview window or close it and click Print... in the options dialog to send the job to the printer.

Print Contact Sheet ◆

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P (or click Print Contact Sheet... on the toolbar) to print a proof sheet, a grid of all visible thumbnails in the current folder.

An options dialog appears first:

• Columns, how many columns across the page (2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 8).
• Show filename, prints the filename on the first label line below each thumbnail.
• Show date and time, prints the file's date and time (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM) on the second label line.
• Show file size, prints the file size (B / KB / MB) on the second label line.
• Show color tag, prints a colored swatch and the color tag name on the third label line.
• Show rating, prints the star rating on the third label line.
• Print scope, choose All visible images (respects any active color/rating filter) or Selected images only (available when one or more thumbnails are selected).

Each thumbnail can show up to three label lines: filename on the first, date and/or size on the second, and color tag (with a colored swatch) and/or rating on the third. Only enabled rows are allocated space.

The dialog also has a Preview... button. It opens a live, zoomable Print Preview window showing what the proof sheet will look like on paper. The preview re-renders automatically when you change any option (columns, captions, or print scope), so you can iterate without sending a real job to the printer. Click Print inside the preview window or close it and click Print... in the options dialog when you're satisfied.

After confirming the options (and optionally previewing), the standard system print dialog opens. Thumbnails are printed at the resolution currently loaded in the grid; for the sharpest output, use a smaller column count.

Live refresh from external edits

If you edit an image in Photoshop, Lightroom, or any other external application while it is open in the viewer, the viewer automatically reloads it when the save lands on disk (the same moment the contact sheet thumbnail refreshes). No need to close and reopen the viewer. This applies to both the single-image view and each panel of the compare view independently.

Deleting from the viewer

Press Delete to remove the currently-viewed image. RAW siblings and the .xmp sidecar go with it. The viewer advances to the next image in the folder (or closes if you just deleted the last one). Ctrl/Cmd+Z restores the file from the Recycle Bin and re-opens the viewer on it. This is the same shared undo history that reverts color and rating changes, see Color Tags & Star Ratings above, so it always undoes whichever action, delete or tag, happened most recently.

Slideshow

Select two or more thumbnails in the contact sheet, then press F5 (or click Slideshow on the toolbar) to start a slideshow on that selection.

• Space pauses and resumes auto-advance.
• Left / Right arrow steps manually and resets the auto-advance timer.
• Esc exits the slideshow.

The interval between slides is set in Preferences > Viewer. The same tab has a Viewer Window option that opens the viewer and slideshow at the main window's size instead of taking over the whole screen, which is helpful for screen recordings and demos.

Compare

Select two, three, or four images in the contact sheet and click Compare (or press C). Two images show side by side; three or four fill a 2x2 grid. Useful for choosing the best image from a burst without bouncing between pairs.

• Tab cycles which pane is focused: first all panes together (synced), then each pane in turn, then back to synced. A subtle highlight shows the focused pane; when synced, none is highlighted.
• Left / Right arrow and the mouse wheel move the focused pane through the folder, or, when synced, move every pane together.
• Zoom (Z, +/-, Ctrl/Cmd+wheel) works the same way: synced zooms every pane in lockstep; focused zooms just that pane.
• Right-click any pane to apply a color tag or star rating to that pane's image only.
• 1-5, 0, letter keys, and \ apply tags to the focused pane. While synced, tag shortcuts are intentionally a no-op, press Tab once to pick a pane first, so a single keypress can never tag the wrong image.
• Esc closes Compare. Every photo you were comparing is still selected when you land back in the grid, so a tag key applies to all of them; click one first if you want to act on just that one.

Delete is intentionally disabled in Compare so you don't lose the wrong image during a close-call review.

Rotate

Right-click one or more thumbnails and choose Rotate Left, Rotate Right, or Flip (180°) to losslessly rotate images. Rotation updates the EXIF Orientation tag without re-encoding the image, so there's no quality loss. The thumbnail updates immediately to show the new orientation. If the full-size viewer or compare view is open and displaying a rotated image, it reloads automatically so you see the updated orientation without closing and reopening. Flip turns the image 180° in one step (the same as two rotations in the same direction).

Rotate and Flip also work on video clips. Some cameras (notably Nikon DSLRs such as the D5) record a clip shot with the camera held vertically as a plain sideways landscape file, with no orientation flag, so it comes in lying on its side. Select the clip and choose Rotate Right, Rotate Left, or Flip (180°) to stand it upright. For video, PhotoTaken writes a standard rotation flag into the clip's metadata; it doesn't re-encode the video, so there's no quality loss. To keep your original safe, the clip is rewritten to a fresh copy rather than edited in place, so a large clip (especially on a slow external or network drive) can take a little while; a "Rotating…" indicator appears while it works and the app stays responsive. Because it's the standard flag, the clip then plays the right way up everywhere, in PhotoTaken, Windows, VLC, and so on, not just in the contact sheet. A mixed selection of photos and clips rotates both in one step.

Deleting Images

Select one or more thumbnails and press Delete (or right-click → Delete) to remove them. RAW+JPEG pairs, and tiles carrying multiple RAW siblings, always delete every attached file together so nothing is left orphaned on disk. .xmp sidecars go with the RAW that owns them.

Recycle Bin / Trash (local drives)

On a local drive, deleted files go to the Windows Recycle Bin (or macOS Trash) and you hear the familiar delete sound. By default a confirmation dialog lists what will be deleted before anything happens; you can turn the confirmation off in Preferences > Files if you prefer to cull at speed.

Ctrl/Cmd+Z restores the most recent batch straight back to its folder, with ratings, color tags, and caption/copyright intact. The restored thumbnails are reselected and scrolled into view so you can see exactly what came back. This is the same Ctrl/Cmd+Z history that undoes color and rating changes (see Color Tags & Star Ratings above), so pressing it repeatedly steps back through your last several actions, delete or tag, in the order you made them.

Network drives

Network deletes behave differently on Windows and Mac because the two operating systems handle the Recycle Bin / Trash for network volumes differently:

• Windows: files on network drives (UNC paths, mapped drives to a share) cannot go to the Recycle Bin, Windows doesn't support it for network storage. The delete is permanent. Ctrl/Cmd+Z cannot undo a network delete on Windows.
• Mac: macOS gives every mounted volume its own Trash, so deleted files move to a hidden .Trashes/<your-uid>/ folder on the network share itself. The files are recoverable from there (you can show hidden files in Finder, or run open /Volumes/<share>/.Trashes/$(id -u)), but they continue to occupy space on the share until you empty that folder. Cmd+Z does not undo a network delete on Mac either, the in-app undo only restores from the local Trash.

In both cases PhotoTaken always confirms network deletes and shows a plain-language warning, regardless of your preference setting.

Convert to DNG ◆

Right-click one or more thumbnails that hold a non-DNG RAW and choose Convert to DNG… to turn them into Adobe DNG files. PhotoTaken wraps the free Adobe DNG Converter tool from Adobe, if the converter isn't installed, PhotoTaken pops a short message with a button that opens Adobe's download page.

The conversion runs in a modal progress dialog that updates per file and stays responsive, the Cancel button lets you stop mid-batch cleanly (the currently converting file finishes so no partial DNG is left on disk). When the run finishes, the dialog reports how many files converted, were skipped, or errored, and the Cancel button becomes Close.

Four of the RAW formats PhotoTaken reads, Hasselblad FFF, Kodak KDC, Leaf MOS, and Sigma X3F, are ones Adobe's converter won't accept. Those files are reported as errors with Adobe's own reason, and the rest of the batch converts normally. Everything else about those formats (browsing, viewing, tagging, filtering, search) works the same as any other RAW.

Delete originals

The dialog has a Delete originals after successful conversion checkbox. Your last choice is remembered.

• Off (default): the source RAW and its .xmp sidecar stay on disk alongside the new DNG. Each shot's tile now carries both formats, and the caption updates to show the combined extensions (IMG_0001.JPG/NEF/DNG).
• On: once the DNG verifies as written, the source RAW and its .xmp sidecar are removed. The tile's RAW list shows only the DNG.

Metadata

Adobe DNG Converter preserves EXIF, IPTC, and XMP from the source RAW, so your rating, color tag, caption, copyright, camera info, and lens data all survive the conversion. You can confirm in Lightroom or with exiftool -Rating -Label -Caption-Abstract file.dng.

When the menu entry is hidden

PhotoTaken hides the Convert to DNG… entry for any tile that already has a DNG sibling, there's nothing left to convert, so the action disappears. This is intentional; it's not a bug.

Where the DNG lands

Each DNG is written next to its source. If you have multi-select across shoots in different folders, each DNG lands in its own source folder. The Ctrl/Cmd+drag RAW as submenu (see RAW + JPEG pairing above) is how you pick which format to hand off to Lightroom once both coexist on disk.

Export / Convert ◆

You can start an export from the Export / Convert toolbar button, the Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E shortcut, or the right-click menu. Select one or more finished images and choose Export / Convert… to save web or client-ready copies, or to convert a batch to another format. This works on rendered images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or WebP). RAW files are not exported; if a RAW has a paired JPEG that JPEG is used, and RAW-only files are skipped.

In the dialog you can:

• Pick the output format: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or WebP. The settings below adapt to your choice, JPEG and WebP show a quality slider, WebP adds a lossless option, PNG shows a compression level (0 fastest to 9 smallest, always lossless), and TIFF shows a compression choice (LZW, ZIP/Deflate, or none).
• Resize to a preset long edge (2048 for web, 1024 for email), full size, or a custom size. Images are never enlarged.
• Add an optional logo watermark from a transparent PNG, choosing its corner, opacity, and size (as a percent of the long edge). Once you browse to a logo, PhotoTaken keeps it, so it is already filled in the next time you export, even if you close the dialog without exporting.
• Place the watermark by hand. When you have exactly one image selected and the watermark is on, a Place on image… button appears. It opens the photo enlarged with the logo on top, starting centered, where you transform it like a Photoshop free transform: drag the logo to move it, drag any corner to stretch it (hold Shift to keep its proportions), and drag the rotate handle just off the top-right corner to rotate it, plus an opacity slider. Click Use this placement and the export drops the logo exactly where, how big, and at what angle you set it. Use this when the right spot depends on the picture; for batches, the corner option still applies to every image.
• Keep copyright and IPTC from the original while GPS is left out (on by default), so a public review page does not leak shoot locations.
• Choose the destination folder and a filename suffix (e.g. -web). The file extension follows the format you picked.

The batch runs in the background with a progress bar you can cancel, and your settings are remembered for next time.

Auto-Refresh

PhotoTaken watches the active folder for changes. When an external app like Photoshop saves a new file into the folder you're browsing, the contact sheet refreshes automatically, no need to press Refresh.

A single new file gets the spotlight. When that external save is one new file (a Photoshop export, for example), PhotoTaken also selects it and scrolls it into view, so you can tag it right away without scrolling to find it. Turn this off in Preferences > Files if you would rather the grid stay put. A card ingest, or any time several files land together, never moves the view.

Network folders are an exception. PhotoTaken does not watch SMB shares or other network volumes for external changes, because the underlying OS change-notification APIs (Windows ReadDirectoryChangesW, macOS FSEvents) don't fire reliably across the network and the synchronous "start watching" call alone can stall the app for tens of seconds on a slow share. If you change a file on a network folder from another tool while it's open in PhotoTaken, switch tabs and back, or click the folder again in the Favorite Folders tree, to pick up the change. Local folders still auto-refresh.

Preferences

Click Preferences… on the toolbar (or press Ctrl/Cmd+,) to open the central settings dialog. Settings are grouped into tabs:

• General: theme (dark / light), an option to show the toolbar as icons only (with labels appearing as tooltips on hover) when the toolbar feels crowded, and whether to ask "Are you sure?" before quitting.
• Thumbnails: default thumbnail size, sort order, which fields to display under thumbnails, the Grid Lines group ("Show lines between thumbnails", on by default, with a line color and a 1-3 px thickness; the checkbox is the same switch as the Grid Lines toolbar button and the ! key in the grid), and the Culling group with its "Advance to the next photo after applying a color or rating" checkbox (off by default).
• Viewer: slide interval in seconds (0.5 to 60, in half-second steps), a Viewer Window option that opens the single-image viewer and slideshow at the main window's size instead of taking over the whole screen, zoom re-decode (re-read the original file at full resolution when you zoom past 1:1), the overview navigator toggle, focus peaking sensitivity, the highlight and shadow clipping thresholds, the Read actual RAW sensor data (slower) toggle for RAW files (on by default), and color pickers for the focus-peaking and exposure-clipping overlays.
• Files: whether to confirm before moving files to the Recycle Bin (network-drive deletes always confirm regardless since they're permanent), and whether PhotoTaken scrolls to a new file added to the current folder by another app.
• Panels: which side (left / right) each panel sits on, and whether it's visible.
• Performance: thumbnail cache size and folder snapshot cache size (bigger caches mean more snappy folder switching at the cost of memory), plus cloud preview toggles, and an option (off by default) for Find Photo Folders to show early results from Spotlight (Mac) or Everything (Windows) while a scan runs. The scan still checks every folder, so the finished list is the same either way.
• Keyboard: pick a key layout (PhotoTaken, Lightroom Classic, or Photo Mechanic) and change individual keys. See Changing the keys under Keyboard Shortcuts above.
• Updates: whether to check for new versions automatically.

All changes take effect immediately when you click OK, no restart needed.

Search

The search row, just under the toolbar, has a wide Search box (focus it from anywhere with Ctrl/Cmd+F) and a Search button that says where it will look: Search This Folder, Search Open Folders, or Search Everything ◆. Click the small arrow on the button to change that; it stays on your choice next time. Type a query and press Enter (or click the button) to search where the button says, Shift+Enter for open folders, or Ctrl/Cmd+Enter for everything. Matching files appear in a new Search Results tab in the Tabs strip. The tab shows up with a magnifier glyph so it stands out from folder tabs, and names the scope it searched.

Plain words match the filename, keywords, caption, creator, copyright, credit, headline, and place name (case-insensitive), plus any other metadata value stored for the photo (a lens name, a software name, a light source, and more), so a plain word can turn up a match even for a field with no operator of its own. Typing sunset beach finds files that have both words covered across those fields. A year works the same way: 2013 finds photos taken in 2013 as well as ones with 2013 in the name or a keyword (and, occasionally, a photo shot at ISO 2013, which is the price of one box that searches everything).

One field is left out of that on purpose: Software (the Metadata panel shows it as Firmware), which records the program or camera firmware that last wrote the file. Matching it made plain-word searches noisy, a search for 2015 would turn up photos shot in 2020 that were edited in Photoshop CC 2015. Search it deliberately with software: and it still works.

Numbers match whole numbers. Typing 2012 finds photos whose metadata contains 2012 as a number in its own right, not photos where those digits happen to sit inside a longer one (a GPS bearing of 224.5220126, say). Filenames are the exception and still match on any part, so 0421 still finds IMG_0421.jpg. Words are unaffected: beach still finds beachside.

Short searches work too. Two-character terms like R5 or RF search your photos' camera and lens details, not just filenames. And when you search a year, the photos actually taken then come first, ahead of any that merely mention it.

Dates in plain English. Type a date the way you would say it and PhotoTaken understands it: July 2013, July 4 2013, July 4, 2013, 4 July 2013, or the short form Jul 2013. Numbers work too as long as the year comes first: 2013-07, 2013-7, 2013-07-04, 2013-7-4. It finds the photos taken then, and also any file whose name carries that phrase, so a poster named "July 2013" still turns up. Mix it with other words to narrow: wedding July 2013. The date: operator below is still there when you want an exact range. Add operators to narrow by camera settings, exposure, date, file type, or location:

Combine plain words and operators freely, e.g. sunset iso:>3200 type:raw.

shutter: is stored in seconds, not a "1 over" fraction, so 1/250 is 0.004. shutter:<0.001 finds shots faster than 1/1000; shutter:>1 finds long exposures over one second.

Filter builder (no syntax needed). ◆ Next to the search box is a Filters button. It opens a builder: click Add filter for a row of field / operator / value, add as many rows as you want, they're combined with AND. The value control adapts to the field you pick, a number or number range for things like ISO or aperture, a dropdown of the actual values in your library for things like white balance, lens, camera make, or location (editable, so you can pick a value or type part of one), a date range for date taken, or a yes/no toggle for flash fired. Pick is any of on an enum field (like white balance) to match several values at once. Press Put in search box (or just Enter) to build the query and drop it into the search box. It does not search: it hands you a finished query, and you choose when and where to run it with the Search button (below). The button used to be called Apply, which looked like it would show you photos and instead just closed the panel. Clear empties the builder back to one blank row, Esc closes it, and the ✕ on a row removes just that filter. When you already have a filter active (you're on a filtered results tab, or one is in the search box), the builder opens pre-filled with it so you can build on top of it. It's the easy way in if you don't want to remember the operators.

How folders get indexed. PhotoTaken indexes a folder for search when you open a tab on it. Nothing crawls in the background and nothing runs on a schedule, so opening the app never sets off a long scan. Search coverage grows naturally as you browse.

Two right-click menus fill the gaps:

• On a tab, choose Refresh Search Index to re-read that folder when you have changed files outside PhotoTaken.
• On a Favorite, choose Index This Folder and Subfolders… to index a whole tree at once. Since a Favorite is often an entire drive, PhotoTaken asks you to confirm first. There is also Index This Folder for just that one folder, and Remove from Search Index to drop its photos back out of search (your files are never touched).

While a tree is being indexed the status bar shows "Scanning your photo library...", then "Indexing X of Y", then "Search index ready". It runs on a background thread, so keep scrolling and culling while it works. Filename search keeps working the whole time.

Where to search. The search box, Filters, and the Search button sit together on their own row under the toolbar. The button always names where it will look, so the choice is on screen rather than hidden in a setting. Click the arrow beside it to switch, and it stays there next time you open PhotoTaken. Each choice has a keyboard shortcut, shown the way your platform writes it (⌘↵ on a Mac, Ctrl+Return on Windows).

• This Folder (Enter): search only the folder you're looking at. It greys out when there's no single folder to mean, which is when you're on results that came from open folders or from everything; if that was your remembered choice, the button switches itself to Search Everything rather than searching nothing. It stays available on results that came from one folder, so you can tighten a filter and search that same folder again.
• Open Folders (Shift+Enter): search across every folder currently open in the Tabs strip.
• Everything ◆ (Ctrl/Cmd+Enter): search everything PhotoTaken has indexed, which is every folder you have opened a tab on plus any Favorite you have indexed from its right-click menu. If a folder you expect is missing, open it once or index its Favorite.

When a search finds nothing, it says why. A search that comes up empty shows a line under the header naming how many folders were actually searched, so you can tell “no photos match” apart from “that folder was never opened”. If some of the photos it did search are indexed by name only, it says that too: photos still in the cloud are deliberately indexed without reading their details, since reading them would mean downloading every one, so a date or camera search will not find them until they are on the computer.

Keeping the search index tidy. Right-click a Favorite and choose Remove from Search Index to clear its photos out of search. PhotoTaken confirms first, your photo files are never touched, and you can index the folder again whenever you like. Photos you delete or move outside PhotoTaken drop out of search on their own, checked at every launch, with a brief status-bar note when any are cleared. Click a search result whose file is gone and it's dropped from the list instead of failing to open (if the file's drive just isn't connected, PhotoTaken says so and leaves the result alone). Unplugging a drive never wipes its photos from search, only files confirmed missing on a currently connected drive are pruned; reconnect the drive and everything on it is searchable again.

A Search Results tab shows the query next to a magnifier glyph, with where it searched on a second line beneath it: the folder's name for a This Folder search, otherwise open tabs or entire index. The same query run in two places gives you two separate tabs, so that second line is what tells them apart at a glance; the results header above the grid repeats it along with the match count ("12 results in shoot").

Search Results tabs are browse-only for now: double-click a thumbnail to open the viewer, right-click for the usual menu. Ratings, color tags, renames, and deletes from inside a Search Results tab don't update the virtual results list, run the search again to refresh. Close a Search Results tab with the ×, Ctrl/Cmd+W, or the tab's context menu. Open searches come back when you relaunch PhotoTaken, showing the same query; a restored search re-runs (with current results) the moment you click its tab.

Keywords come from the standard XMP dc:Subject / IPTC Keywords fields, which you can edit with Edit IPTC Info… (Ctrl/Cmd+I) or apply wholesale via a Stationery Pad. Caption, creator, copyright, and place come from the standard IPTC/XMP descriptive fields.

License Activation

PhotoTaken is sold as a one-time purchase, and it also offers a free 14-day trial. The first time you launch the app after a fresh install, a small Welcome to PhotoTaken window opens and asks you to pick one of three things:

• Try it free for 14 days: all features, no credit card, no license key.
• I already bought PhotoTaken: enter the key from your receipt.
• Buy PhotoTaken: opens the pricing page in your browser. The window stays open behind it, because once you've bought, you come back here and choose I already bought PhotoTaken to type your key in.

If this computer's trial has already run out, that window opens headed Your free trial has ended and offers only the last two choices. There's no Try it free for 14 days row, because a second trial on the same computer isn't something we can give you.

If you pick the trial, the next screen asks for an email address and nothing else. The line under the email box tells you where you stand: it reads Enter your email to begin until what you've typed looks like a real address, then changes to Ready. 14 days, all features. That's the moment Start free trial switches on. There's also a Name this computer field (defaults to your computer's name) so you can recognize this machine in the license panel later, and an optional Email me tips and updates about PhotoTaken checkbox that starts unticked.

If you already bought, the next screen asks for two things:

• Email: the address you used when you bought the app. The license is tied to this email, so use the one on your purchase receipt.
• License key: a 32-character code in the form PT-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX, also on your receipt. It's case-insensitive, and stray spaces or missing hyphens are fine. The window will reject obvious typos before it even tries to contact the server, so Activate stays switched off until both the email and the key look right.

Both screens have a Back link to the three choices, and both register this computer with the activation server once when you finish. After that PhotoTaken works fully offline, with no further phone-homes, ever. If your internet is down later, the app still launches and works normally.

Your purchase covers up to two computers. Activate on your studio Mac and your travel laptop, your desktop and a backup machine, whatever fits. If you try to activate a third computer, the window expands to show your two existing activations and lets you pick one to deactivate; once the slot frees up, the new computer activates automatically.

Reinstalling on the same computer does not use a slot. PhotoTaken ties activations to a stable per-machine identifier supplied by Windows or macOS itself (not a random ID we make up), so uninstalling and reinstalling, or doing a clean Windows reinstall on the same hardware, finds the existing slot and re-issues a fresh license without consuming a new activation.

If something goes wrong (you typed the wrong email, the key has been revoked, you can't reach the server), the window shows a specific message right under the Activate button explaining what to do. Most fixes are: double-check your receipt, check your internet connection, or email support@lormarsoft.com if the receipt looks right but activation still fails.

Managing your license inside the app

Once activated with a purchased key, Preferences > License shows your active license: the key (with the middle masked so a glance at your screen doesn't expose it), the email it's tied to, this computer's label, and when it was activated. A Deactivate this computer button frees the slot on this machine; the app closes immediately after deactivation. Useful when you're selling or retiring a computer and want to move the slot to your replacement.

The About PhotoTaken dialog also shows a Licensed to line under the version number, followed by the activated email, so you can confirm at a glance which account this install belongs to.

During your free trial

A running trial looks different in the same two places, and counts itself down in a third:

• About PhotoTaken shows a Free trial: line with your email instead of a Licensed to line, so it never claims you own something you haven't paid for. Under it, during a trial only, sit Buy PhotoTaken and Enter license key. Activate a key there and the dialog updates itself: the line becomes Licensed to and the buttons go away.
• Preferences > License has no key, no computer label, and no Deactivate button (there's nothing to deactivate yet). Instead it shows a headline that counts down (Free trial: 9 days left., then Free trial: 1 day left., then Free trial: today is the last day., and finally Your free trial has ended.), the email you started the trial with, and two buttons: Buy PhotoTaken opens the pricing page in your browser, and Enter license key opens the license key screen right there so you can enter a key you just bought without closing Preferences. It skips the three choices and goes straight to the key form, since you already have a trial running.
• The title bar counts down too, e.g. PhotoTaken - Trial: 9 days left, then PhotoTaken - Trial: 1 day left, then PhotoTaken - Trial: last day. A paid copy just shows PhotoTaken.

With three days or fewer left, PhotoTaken also shows a Trial ending reminder right after the window opens (Your PhotoTaken trial ends in 3 days., or ends tomorrow., or ends today.), with Buy PhotoTaken, Enter license key, and Continue trial buttons.

Only two things close that reminder: Continue trial, or a key that activates. Buy PhotoTaken opens the pricing page and leaves the reminder open behind it, so when you come back from the browser it's still there, now reading Finished buying? Enter your license key below. with Enter license key highlighted. And if you open the key screen and then cancel, you come back to the reminder rather than being dropped into the app.

It appears on every launch during those last three days. All of this disappears the moment you activate a purchased key.

What does not happen

• No account to create, no password to remember.
• No background usage tracking or telemetry of any kind.
• No periodic re-check with the server. The activation conversation happens once, on first launch.
• Canceling the welcome window exits the app cleanly with no main window. Re-run it when you have your key, or start the free 14-day trial with just your email address.

Update Checking

PhotoTaken checks whether a newer version is available when it starts, and again once a day while it stays open. When it starts and finds one, a notification appears with the version number, release notes, and a button to open the download page.

Whenever a newer version is found, a red dot and Update available also appear at the bottom right of the window, and stay there until you update. Click them to see the notification again. The daily check only shows this marker, never a popup, so it won't interrupt you while you work. This check can be turned off in Preferences > Updates.

For your safety, the Open button only fires when the download URL points at phototakensoftware.com or github.com over HTTPS. If the update server is ever compromised and serves a redirect to an unknown host, you'll still see the version notice but the Open button is hidden, you won't be one click away from an attacker-supplied download. Release-notes text is always shown verbatim (no clickable links rendered) for the same reason.

Theme

Toggle Light Mode / Dark Mode with the toolbar button or in Preferences > General. The toolbar button shows a sun in dark mode (click to go light) and a moon in light mode (click to go dark). The choice is remembered.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcuts are written Windows/Mac: Ctrl/Cmd+P means the Control key on Windows and the Command (⌘) key on Mac, and Alt/Option means Alt on Windows, Option (⌥) on Mac. Use Command, not the Mac's Control key, for these. Letter, digit, and arrow shortcuts are identical on both platforms.

Function keys (F1, F2, F5): if these seem to do nothing on a Mac (or change brightness/volume), press them with Fn held, e.g. Fn+F1, or turn on System Settings → Keyboard → "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys." On Windows, some laptops need Fn or an Fn Lock too.

◆ marks a shortcut for a Pro-only feature.

Toolbar actions include Apply Stationery Pad… ◆ (enabled when at least one image is selected), Manage Stationery Pads… ◆ (always available), Edit IPTC Info… (Ctrl/Cmd+I, enabled when at least one image is selected), and Edit EXIF Info… ◆ (Ctrl/Cmd+E, enabled when at least one image is selected).

Changing the keys

The table above shows the PhotoTaken layout, which is what you get out of the box. You can switch to a layout that matches another app, or set your own keys, in Preferences > Keyboard.

• Layout. Pick PhotoTaken, Lightroom Classic, or Photo Mechanic at the top of the tab.
• Lightroom Classic: 1 to 5 set stars, 0 clears them, and 6 red, 7 yellow, 8 green, 9 blue. Lightroom's P, X, and U are flags, and PhotoTaken has no flags, so those keys do nothing. Purple, Cyan, and the auto-advance switch have no key in this layout until you give them one.
• Photo Mechanic: 1 to 8 set colors (Purple, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, Gray, in that order; the first is certain and 2 to 8 are our best guess), and 0 clears the color. Stars are Control+1 to Control+5 on a Mac and Alt+1 to Alt+5 on Windows, with Control/Alt+0 clearing them. Teal has no key here.
• Change one key. The list is grouped as Rating, Color, Review, and View. Click the key button next to an action, then press the new key. Press Esc to back out. Each row has a Clear button that leaves the action with no key, shown as (none).
• Key already taken. If the key belongs to another action, PhotoTaken shows a "Key in use" box that says, for example, "B is used by Blue. Swap them?" Choose Swap to trade the two keys, or Cancel to leave things as they were.
• Edited layouts. Once you change anything, the layout name shows (edited). Reset to layout throws away your changes and goes back to the layout as shipped.
• When it takes effect. Click OK and the new keys work right away, no restart needed. The ? cheat sheet, the color names in menus (like Red (R)), and the tooltips all show the keys you're using now.

Some keys can't be used. Any key with Shift held is off limits, and so is any Ctrl/Cmd combination. The keys the app already depends on stay put too: the arrows, Enter, Esc, Space, Tab, F1, F5, Delete, and +, =, and -.

Troubleshooting

The Metadata panel shows nothing / "ExifTool not found"

PhotoTaken reads metadata using ExifTool, which is bundled with the app on both Windows and Mac, you don't need to install anything. If you're running from source on a dev machine, install ExifTool and make sure it's on your PATH:

# Windows
winget install --id OliverBetz.ExifTool -e

# Mac
brew install exiftool

My layout is wrong after an update

From the toolbar, toggle the panels you want visible (Favorite Folders, Tabs, Metadata) and drag them to the side you prefer. The new layout is saved when you quit.

I accidentally closed a folder tab

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T or click Reopen Closed Tab. PhotoTaken remembers the last few closed tabs.

I accidentally deleted the wrong image(s)

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z right away. The most recent Recycle-Bin delete is restored with ratings, color tags, and caption/copyright intact. This works only for files that went to the Recycle Bin, see Deleting Images above; network deletes are permanent and cannot be undone.

I accidentally set the wrong rating or color tag

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z right away. The most recent color or rating change reverts to its prior value, whether it touched one photo or a whole multi-select batch (the batch reverts together in a single press). This is the same Ctrl/Cmd+Z history used for delete undo above, so it always undoes whichever action, tag or delete, happened most recently, and it works the same way in the grid and in the viewer.

I just renamed a batch of photos and want them back

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Z right away. Every file goes back to its original name, along with its paired RAW, its .xmp sidecar, and its color tag and star rating. This works for a single rename too. If a photo was deleted since the rename, or something else has taken one of the old names, PhotoTaken restores the rest and tells you which ones it had to skip. Undo lasts until you close PhotoTaken.

A folder I had open shows "no longer available"

If a folder was renamed, moved, or unmounted while PhotoTaken was closed, the contact sheet shows an empty grid with a "no longer available" message instead of stale thumbnails. Re-add the folder from its new location in the Favorite Folders panel, or pick it from the folder tree if it's still on a known drive. The same message appears when a network share drops mid-session.

Known Issues

Problems we know about and are working on. If you hit something that isn't here, please tell us: support@lormarsoft.com.

A RAW file and a video clip with the same name share their color and rating

If a folder holds two files with the same name but different extensions, and both are types that store tags in a separate .xmp file, they end up sharing one .xmp and therefore one color and one rating. Give the RAW a red label and the clip turns red too.

This affects same-name pairs like DSC_0001.NEF and DSC_0001.MOV, or DSC_0001.ARW and DSC_0001.PSD. It does not affect a JPEG paired with a RAW (the usual shoot-RAW+JPEG case), because those two are shown as a single photo on purpose and are meant to share their tags. Ordinary photo folders are not affected.

Workaround, with a catch: go to Preferences > Files > RAW Sidecars and set Naming to Photo Mechanic style. That names them DSC_0001.NEF.xmp and DSC_0001.MOV.xmp instead of both being DSC_0001.xmp, so each keeps its own tags. The catch is that Lightroom does not read that form, so this is only the right trade if your workflow doesn't depend on Lightroom picking your tags up. Switch before you tag a folder; tags you already applied stay behind in the old .xmp.

If you do need Lightroom, the way to avoid this today is to keep same-named clips and RAW files in separate folders.

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