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Organise the catalogue: collections and folders, search and filtering, and the built-in tools for culling, finding duplicates, faces, keywording and semantic search.

Collections & folders

  • New Collection… (⌘N) — a hand-picked group of photos.
  • New Smart Collection… — a collection defined by rules (for example, every 5-star photo from last month) that keeps itself up to date.
  • New Collection Set… — a folder for organising collections.
  • New Folder… (⇧⌘N) — create a folder on disk within your photo library.

Search & filters

  • Find… (⌘F) — jump to the search field. Search matches filenames, paths, keywords and AI tags.
  • Enable Filters (⌘L) — turn the filter bar on or off. Choosing any filter turns filtering on for you.
  • Filter by Preset — reapply a filter combination you've saved; Save Current Filter as Preset… names the one you have set up now.
  • Filter by Flag / Rating / Color Label / Kind — narrow the current view to matching photos. Kind distinguishes master photos from virtual copies.
  • Filter by Metadata… — narrow by camera, lens, file type or year, picked from what's actually in your catalogue. Reset Metadata Filters clears them.
  • Refine Photos… (⌥⌘R) — a cull-refinement pass over the current view: unflagged photos are marked as Rejected and your Picks are cleared, so each pass narrows the take a little further. One ⌘Z undoes the whole pass.

Photo tools

  • Assisted Culling… — groups a burst and surfaces the sharpest frame, flagging soft or blinked shots (part of the Cull and organise a shoot workflow).
  • Re-read Metadata from Files… — refresh camera/lens and other EXIF from the files on disk, for the selected folder or the whole catalogue.
  • Find RAW + JPEG Pairs — sweeps the catalogue for RAW and JPEG shots of the same frame and links each pair, so a RAW+JPEG capture shows as one photo you can switch between (see Photo ▸ Use RAW / JPEG, and the Duplicates & RAW+JPEG pairs guide).
  • Rename Photo… and Convert Photo to DNG… — rename on disk, or convert RAWs to DNG.

Maintenance

The Maintenance submenu keeps the catalogue in step with the files on disk. Each tool runs in the background with a progress bar in the sidebar.

  • Find All Missing Photos — scans the catalogue for photos whose file is no longer on disk and gathers them into one view, so you can relink or remove them.
  • Validate DNG Files — checks every DNG in the catalogue still opens and decodes, and collects any that fail so you can investigate.
  • Synchronize Folder… — reconcile a folder with what's actually on disk: add new files, flag missing ones.
  • Previews ▸ Build Standard Previews — pre-builds the thumbnail cache for the current selection or folder, so browsing that folder is instant instead of reading each file as you scroll. Especially handy before working through a folder on a network drive.
  • Previews ▸ Build 1:1 Previews — pre-renders full-resolution previews so zooming to 100% in the Loupe is instant and sharp, even offline. Optional: without them, the Loupe renders full-resolution detail on demand. Discard 1:1 Previews frees the disk space again.

Find Duplicates

  • Assisted Duplicate Finder… — finds byte-for-byte duplicates using a size pre-filter and content hashing (see Duplicates & RAW+JPEG pairs).
  • Find Near-Duplicates… — catches resized or re-saved copies that aren't byte-identical, using a perceptual hash (see Near-duplicates).

Analyse Photos

Library-wide passes that build a resumable index the first time you run them and pick up where they left off if interrupted. The AI-based ones run entirely on your Mac — see AI tools.

  • Find Faces Again… — detect faces so you can name people and browse by them (see the People & faces guide).
  • Auto-Tag Photos with AI… — suggests keywords in bulk, written to a searchable index.
  • Build Semantic Search Index… — enables natural-language search (“yellow guitar”). Also available per-folder from the Explorer's right-click menu. See Find any photo.
  • Scan for Clipped Highlights — flags every photo with blown highlights: a badge on the grid, a Clipped filter, and a prompt in Develop. Recovering a photo clears its flag, and new imports are checked automatically.
  • Import Develop Settings from Lightroom… — brings the look of your Lightroom Classic edits across for photos migrated from a .lrcat. See What happens to your develop edits.
  • Repair Lightroom Previews…: for photos migrated from Lightroom Classic, finds any whose Lightroom look isn't really Lightroom's preview (the original camera image showing instead, or a grid thumbnail that doesn't match) and fixes them. See If a Lightroom preview can't be used.

Previous / Next Selected Photo (⌘← / ⌘→) step through a multi-photo selection one at a time.

Coming soon

Review Comments, Flat-Field Correction… and Plug-in Extras appear in the menu but aren't functional yet. Show Photos in Subfolders is always on, so its menu item has nothing to switch.