I just downloaded and started the latest version of RAW Therapee. Obviously, the first thing to do is open the file Browser and navigate to a photo. I keep photos on my Desktop and in an external Drive called “Photos”. I am able to navigate to both these places but if i click on them (or double click on them) all that happens is the name highlights in white and/or the little arrow disappears. I would like to try RAW Therapee out but I can’t if I can’t open any photos. What am I doing wrong? Obviously, I am off to a poor start. :-(((
Thanks for any guidance!
Endre
Double click on the folder first, then try to open a file. Please let us know.
I’ve done that. I double click all the folders. If i click on them once, they highlight white. If I double click or right click they turn white and the little arrow on the left disappears. I can then click that same one over and over and the little arrow never returns. It’s very weird. I am a photographer so I am quite familiar with how one can navigate around Lightroom or Photoshop. RAW Therapee ought to work similarly but I tried everything I could think of before I wrote the help request above. Thanks for your response.
It does when you double click another folder, close the program and then re-open it. I think it’s just letting you know the last folder you looked at amongst perhaps other things.
Thanks, again. I tried that, too. I just tried it again, just to make sure. I double click a folder. It turns white and the little arrow disappears. Clicking on another folder does the same thing but the little arrow never returns to the previous folder(s). Besides, double clicking on any of the folders does nothing other than highlight them and lose the little arrow. I still can’t navigate to open any photos to try to work with them. I also tried closing and restarting it again several times before i wrote my first question so, while that was also a good suggestion, unfortunately, it doesn’t help to solve the problem.
I can’t find anything in search that relates to your specific issue. I don’t use the exe files, but rather the RT zip’s for my cpu found here. . . RTW64NightlyBuilds/ – Keybase.pub. Never had an issue with these builds. I create a shortcut of the rawtherapee.exe to my taskbar from the extracted folder. I use the Skylake build for my Coffee Lake cpu.
Are you on Windows or Mac?
Wish I could help you more
What kind of files are you trying to open? Have you gone into the preferences and made sure the correct file extensions are checked?
This is the most important question.
Another is: which version of RawTherapee did you download and from where?
Hi Paperdigits and Thanatomanic!
I downloaded the latest version of RAW Therapee (Version 5.8) 64bit Mac from the RAW Therapee website, so I assume that is the most up to date, proper version. As to setting preferences:
1.) There is no “Preferences” in a pull-down at the top underneath the “RAW Therapee-bin” next to the apple in the top left of the toolbar. Where else might I go to set Preferences?
All I am trying to do is open ANY photo file I have. I have RAW files, I have Tiff files, I have DNG files, Jpeg files, PNG files, and PSD files. I cannot navigate to any of the places where any of those are kept since nothing will open. All I can do is highlight the various folders and sometimes navigate into the various sub-folders but when I get to anywhere that photo files are kept, those sub-folders won’t open.
One of the recommended uses for RAW Therapee is to do interpolation from smaller files. I head about RAW Therapee from Mark Metternich who says it is by far the best interpolation software for enlarging fine-art photos for big prints. All I want to do is navigate to a 16 bit Tiff file, open it and make it bigger.
Thanks for your kind interest,
Endre
Is it about your RT instance’s access rights to your image files?
I copied some raw files to a new folder (Linux), changed owner to root
and set access mask to 0700 (meaning owner exclusive). RT showed the folder and the triangle “arrow”. Clicking marked the folder name white and removed the arrow.
Probably a recent macos version that needs to be told programs are allowed access to your files.
So, it’d the os not allowing Rawtherapee access to those folders. Somewhere in your system settings there should be something to allow it or turn this behavior of for Rawtherapee.
I’m not going into if this is a good feature or not - because I sort of get it - but macos doesn’t allow ‘unknown’ programs access to certain parts of the file system in recent versions. Software made at home or in spare time - like most open source stuff - will fall in this unknown category pretty quickly, because it is not downloaded from an apple approved source and/or the executable is not signed and approved by Apple.
Thanks, Odds and Jorismak.
I thought you might be right so I checked into whether or not my Mac had disallowed RT from access to my photos. I am familiar with that problem from other applications. Unfortunately, RT was not listed among the apps that were in the list available to turn on or off, so that can’t be the problem.
Meanwhile, I discovered that there are two main folders that RT has access to. One is the one with my name and it is from that main folder that I have been following the path through all the subfolders, trying to access my Desktop or the external Photos drive. I checked the path through all the folders to make sure I was following it the same way as I would were I trying to access photos from Lightroom. So, I know I was following the correct path to get there. In Lightroom my Desktop photos will open but not in RT. That said, I also found that the other main folder is also called “Photos”. That is NOT my external Photos drive but something within my Mac. I didn’t know I had this “Photos” main folder on my Mac and it is full of hundreds of all sorts of old Tiff, Jpeg, and DNG files - some going back as far as 20 years. RT is able to open photos from that folder. I cleaned out all that excess junk from that Photos main folder and pasted in a Tiff photo from my Desktop. RT was able to access that photo. 
Although I would prefer to open things via the normal path that is like Lightroom or Photoshop, as a workaround, now that I have found it, I suppose I can use that “Photos” folder as a way to access the photos that I want to work on with RT. So, I am making progress.
Thanks for your help. If you have any further ideas on how I can get my photos to open more easily, I would appreciate it. In one sense, though, at least is working, so that is good.
All the best,
Endre
Mac is not my cup of tea, so I am not the right person to advice you on this. If you post the access rights set on the Photos folders (the folder that works and the one that doesn’t) as well as the access rights on the file you copy/pasted, both the source file and the target file, that information may trigger a Mac savvy forum member to help you.
Thanks OddS,
I appreciate your suggestion but, unfortunately, i have no idea what you are referring to when you write about posting the “access rights set” of the folders and the photo. Sadly, I suspect that sort of thing is way beyond my ken.
All the best,
Endre
My bad, I should probably have referred to permissions, as in “folder permissions” and “file permissions”. The main point is to make sure that the user account that runs the RT has the folder and file permissions it takes to operate on your image files.
Thanks OddS,
Not being a tech person, even a discussion of “folder permissions” and such are somewhat mystifying to me. I’ve heard of such tjhings before so I will take your advice and investigate along those lines further.
After I wrote that above, I went back to RT and see that it has no “Preferences”. Presumably, there has to be a way to access someplace to make the recommended changes. How can I change the folder or file permissions it I don’t know where they are kept?
Further update: After researching “Permissions” I see how it could be done but when I open the “Permissions” are of either the “Photos” drive or of RT, there appears to be no option to add one to the other. More reserch needed…
All best wishes,
Endre
The preferences button is shown in a post easier in this thread.
If you can find this icon on the RT file browser or editing window it will take you to preferences
