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Photo menu

Everything you do to the selected photo or photos: flags, ratings and colours, rotate and flip, virtual copies, stacking, opening in another editor, and removal.

Note

The flag, rating and colour keys (P / X / U, 1–5 for stars, 6–9 and 0 for colour labels, B) work directly on the grid without opening this menu, and can be remapped in Preferences ▸ Keyboard.

Flags, ratings & colour labels

  • Set Flag — Flagged (pick), Rejected or Unflagged.
  • Set Rating — None through 5 stars.
  • Set Color Label — one of your five colours, or None.
  • Auto Advance — when on, applying a flag, rating or colour moves the selection to the next photo automatically, so you can cull without touching the arrow keys.
Guide

For the full keep-your-best workflow — keyboard shortcuts, Compare and Survey, Assisted Culling and deleting rejects — see Cull and organise a shoot.

Rotate & flip

Rotate Left / Rotate Right turn the photo 90°. Flip Horizontal / Flip Vertical mirror it. All four apply straight from the grid — no need to enter Develop — and are non-destructive and reversible.

Virtual copies

  • Create Virtual Copy — make an independent copy of a photo that shares the same original file but can carry its own crop, develop settings and metadata. Costs no extra disk space.
  • Set Copy as Original — promote a virtual copy so it becomes the master.

RAW + JPEG pairs

Use RAW / JPEG (Switch Pair Source) (⇧⌘J) flips which half of a RAW+JPEG pair is the active one. When you shoot RAW+JPEG and import both, a pair shows as a single photo; this command switches it between the JPEG (great for culling and quick edits) and the RAW (for real recovery), carrying your flags, rating, colour and keywords across automatically. See the Duplicates & RAW+JPEG pairs guide.

Edit In

Send the photo to an external editor (for example an installed image editor) and have the result catalogued automatically when you save. The editors listed here are the ones you've configured in Preferences ▸ External Editing; your default editor gets ⌘E.

Develop Settings

Copy Settings… (⇧⌘C) copies a chosen subset of a photo's develop adjustments; Paste Settings (⇧⌘V) applies them across the whole selection in one pass.

  • Import from Lightroom… — re-read the selection's Lightroom Classic edits from its catalogue. Photos with a Lightroom Classic preview get that exact look back; others get their edits translated into editable settings.
  • Convert Baked Look to Editable Sliders — for a photo migrated with its Lightroom Classic appearance baked in, translate that look back into editable settings: Basic, white balance, crop, tone curve, HSL and spot removal in Develop, and black & white or colour grading in the Grading module. Trades the exact baked appearance for editability, and it can't currently be undone. See What happens to your develop edits.

Stacking

Group related frames (a burst, bracketed exposures) into a single collapsible stack.

  • Group into Stack (⌘G) / Unstack (⇧⌘G).
  • Move to Top of Stack, Split Stack.
  • Auto-Stack by Capture Time… — group automatically by how close together frames were shot.
  • Expand / Collapse a stack, or all stacks at once.

Keywords, navigation & removal

  • Go to Folder in Library — jump the sidebar and grid to the folder containing the selected photo.
  • Add to Quick Collection — add the selection to the scratch tray (see File ▸ Quick Collection).
  • People… — detect and name faces (see the People & faces guide).
  • Add Keywords… — tag the selection.
  • Show in Finder — reveal the original file on disk.
  • Remove Photo from Catalogue — remove the selected photos from the catalogue.
  • Delete Rejected Photos… (⌘⌫) — remove every Rejected-flagged photo in the current view at once.

Photo Merge & Enhance

  • Photo Merge ▸ HDR… and Focus Stack… combine a bracket of frames into one image — one high-dynamic-range photo, or one that's sharp front to back. See the HDR & focus stacking guide.
  • Enhance… runs AI Super Resolution on the selection, writing a higher-resolution copy stacked with each original. It uses the same on-device model as the Develop AI panel — see AI tools.

Lock to Second Window & Reference View

  • Lock to Second Window — holds the Secondary Display on the current photo, so it stays put while you keep browsing or editing on the main screen. Choose it again to release it.
  • Open in Reference View — opens Develop with a reference photo beside the one you're editing (also ⇧R in Develop), for matching a look across a set. Pick the reference with Set as Reference Photo on the right-click menu.
Coming soon

Photo Merge ▸ Panorama and HDR Panorama appear in the menu but aren't functional yet.