nothing to the left of the left sidebar

I am using an appimage on Linux 19. When I open RT for the first time I get the file browser but after that it disappears. I have no way of opening files. It there a way to show / hide the file browser?

2 things come to mind:

  1. You have unintentionally hidden the left pane. You can use the show/hide icons to (un)hide panels: hu.1 / hu.2 or use the shorcut keys: l and alt-l (right panel).
    More info about all this can be found here in the RawPedia docs: File Browser and Keyboard Shortcuts.

  2. This could also be happening due to RawTherapee having 2 modes:

    • File browser mode. This “full blown” mode happens when you start RawTherapee itself. There will be a file browser present.
    • No-file browser (“simple”) mode.

The second is triggered when you click on an image/raw file on your desktop (or external file browser) and tell it to open with, rawtherapee in this case. This has the side effect that if you select 2 (or more) files and use open with that multiple RawTherapee instances will be started.

Thank you Jacques for explaining this. Ctrl+F2 did not do anything when I tried it. How would you go from “simple mode” to “full blown mode”?

That one is not used to (un)hide the left panel (file navigator), it is used to switch tabs (“active areas”).

As I mentioned before: You need to use l (that would be a lower case L).

And have you tried the icons I mentioned to accomplish this?

You cannot switch once you are in either of the 2 modes. To have access to all your RAWs/Images you want to normally start RawTherapee and not select a RAW in an external manager and do open with… and then …RawTherapee.

“l” shows/hides my left side bar and “alt+l” shows/hides my right side bar.
it is the left menu bar with the editor, queue, file browser tabs which i lose and then can not get back

OK Jacques, I can open RT and get the left vertical menu bar so I can use the file browser to find my image and then use the editor tab to work on it.
Thank you for your help. Bye

Read Command-Line Options - RawPedia and adjust your operating system file browser accordingly. Hint: use -R

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