How to select which images to edit while in fullscreen (culling)

Software RawTherapee
1

Hi!

Just trying to switch from LR to RT, and I am already failing at the first step: pre-screening my images and selecting which ones to spend more time/editing on.

I don’t seem to be able to figure out this very basic use case, and hope someone here can help me:

  1. Look at a single image so that it fills the screen, or at least a large part of it
  2. Press a key to rate/mark it with hotkey
  3. switch to the next/previous picture with hotkey

This is basically step one of my LR workflow, look at everything in Library mode, mark what I want to keep, and then edit it, and delete the rest.

Now I cant seem to figure this out in RT. The file browser does not let me zoom the thumbnails in beyond displaying 6 pictures in a row… (why…?!).

The inspect tab shows me a 1:1 zoom of the picture, which is useless for doing culling/preselection.

I found a fullscreen inspector window mode that you can turn in on the options while doing a web search for this problem, but that requires me to keep holding a key while looking at the picture, and does not let me seamlessly switch back and forth between a picture and the next one.

Please help, what am I missing…

I am on Windows 10, if that matters…

Thanks

2

@SirOcelot welcome to the forum
Me also were searching for to solve this problem, even the full screen inspector already is really helpful.
Then i came across with the quick raw picker by qdwang (GitHub - RawLabo/QuickRawPicker: 📷 QuickRawPicker is a free and open source program that lets you cull, pick or rate raw photos captured by your camera. It is also compatible with the XMP sidecar file used by Adobe Bridge/Lightroom/Darktable or PP3 sidecar file used by Rawtherapee.) which fits my needs. Even its a separate software you need to call before opening RawTherapee, its worth to have a look at!

HTH Martin

1 Like
3

You can change the max thumbnail size in
Preferences > File Browser > Max thumbnail size

Combined with “inspect” it works well for me. I do initial cull etc in Geeqie though. I prefer to use a lightweight fast and file grouping (jpg, raw, xmp) software for this tedious task. I also, ideally, tag in Geeqie before opening RT. Geeqie is quite fast with keyword autocomplete etc. Info Sidebar

1 Like
4

The inspect window has more features than is obvious at first glance. The documentation on RawPedia is not up to date. You can refer to my notes here instead: Document Inspect · Issue #6115 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub

2 Likes
5

One thing I can’t figure out. Is it possible to go to next/previous image in the full screen inspector?

6

A work around for culling workflow would be:

  1. Set Preferences > General > Open inspector in own window or full screen
  2. Shift +f on thumbnail in file browser
    3. Left click full screen preview to make it sticky
  3. F11 to toggle full screen preview into window mode
  4. Resize window to suit
  5. Press f to make preview fill window
  6. Hover over thumbnails to preview full images
  7. Cull / rate images.

That’s quite the process!

Summary

But it works well.

Oops rating shortcuts don’t work in inspector mode!?

So to make it work you have to have a window manager that allows you to set the inspector to “always on top”. This will allow you to star the thumbnails using the mouse.

1 Like
7

Hey all, wow, thank you so much for all the good input, will try the various methods and see which will work the simplest/fastes for me. Amazing community, thanks again :smiling_face: