Browse the grid and filmstrip

The grid is the Catalog workspace’s main view: your photos as thumbnails, for the folder, collection or search you chose in the left panel. The filmstrip, under the viewer in Loupe, Survey, Compare and Edit, shows the same photos in a row.

Screenshot: the grid with 12 thumbnails, one selected, one with a color label bar, one with a stack count chip and one with a folded corner

Choose what the grid shows

Click an entry in the left panel. The toolbar shows where the photos come from, with a count.

Entry	Shows
All Photographs	Every photo in the catalog.
Quick Collection	Photos you marked with B or the dot on a thumbnail.
Previous Import	The photos added by the latest import.
Missing Photos	Photos whose file can’t be found. It appears only while some are missing.
A folder	Its photos, and those of its subfolders.
A collection	The photos in it.

The filter field above these lists hides folders and collections whose names don’t contain what you type.

Select photos

Click a photo to select it. Ctrl-click adds or removes one and Shift-click selects a range. Image › Select All (Ctrl+A by default) selects every photo shown and Select None (Ctrl+D) clears the selection. The toolbar counts the selection (“N photos · M selected”), and the info panel shows the first one you picked.

Most Image commands work on every selected photo at once. Right-click a photo for the same commands.

Double-click a photo to open it in Edit, or select it and press L for the Loupe.

Change the size

Drag the size slider at the right of the toolbar, or hold Ctrl and use the mouse wheel over the grid. Double-click the slider to return to the default size. Thumbnails run from 80 to 512 pixels wide. A narrow window hides the slider first, then the color dots; Ctrl+wheel still works.

Change the order

The sort control at the right of the toolbar offers Date Taken (the default), Filename, Rating, Import Date and Date Modified. The arrow beside it flips between newest first and oldest first.

Read a thumbnail

Screenshot: one thumbnail enlarged, with callouts for the stars, color label bar, capture info lines, file name, edited badge, Quick Collection dot and Edit chip

Stars and a thin color bar under the thumbnail show the rating and label.
Two lines of capture info sit under the photo: the exposure (1/125 · ƒ/9 · ISO 64 · 50 mm) and the size (6048 × 4024 · 24.3 MP). Small thumbnails hide them. Turn them off for shorter cells under File › Preferences… › Library, Show capture info.
An edited badge marks a photo you have changed in Edit.
A warning badge and a faded thumbnail mark a photo whose file is missing.
An M badge marks a merge result. Its tooltip says what was merged.
A folded corner marks a virtual copy, and a count chip marks a stack.
Point at a thumbnail to see more: ghost stars you can click to rate, a dot that adds it to the Quick Collection, and an Edit chip that opens it in Edit.

Hover a thumbnail for a tooltip with the file name, date and camera settings.

Drag photos

Drag photos onto a collection to add them, or onto Survey to compare them. Dragging onto a folder in the Folders panel moves the files on disk; DarkRay asks first. See Move and rename.

Technical details: how thumbnails load

DarkRay builds a thumbnail for each photo when it enters the catalog and keeps it beside the catalog. The grid loads a thumbnail only when its cell is on screen, and keeps about 384 MB of them in memory. Above a certain size, cells use the larger preview instead of the thumbnail, so big cells stay sharp. Thumbnail resolution under Library in Preferences sets the stored size (128, 256 or 512); changing it rebuilds thumbnails in the background.