Moving through the pass
A pass is the ordered list of frames you are working through — the whole library, or whatever the views line has narrowed it to. This page is about getting around in it: one frame at a time, by the strip of frames under the photograph, or by jumping anywhere in the whole run.
One frame at a time
Press → for the next frame and ← for the previous one. In Single the two chevrons either side of the photograph do the same, and so do Go ▸ Next and Go ▸ Previous in the menu bar. With auto-advance on, a decision steps forward too. A zoom belongs to the frame it was opened on: moving to another frame brings the next one in at fit.
The strip
The bottom band under the photograph is the strip: every frame in the pass, in the pass's own order, as a row of small cells. It is there in Single and in Frames alike, at every moment — there is no control that hides it.
A cell shows what is true of its frame and nothing else:
- the photograph;
- the decision as the cell's bottom edge, in its colour — green for a Take, amber for a Hold, red for a Reject. An Undecided frame has no edge. A rejected frame is drawn faint;
- the app's proposal, when there is one, as a small dashed mark at the top-right;
- a heart for a favourite and a swatch for a colour label at the top-left;
- the rating as orange dots at the bottom-left.
The frame you are on is ringed, and the strip keeps it centred. Stepping one frame either way slides the strip under the ring; landing somewhere else entirely — a click in Frames, a scrub on the track, a new pass — simply arrives.
Click a cell to make that frame the active one. That is all a click does: it never changes the view, opens anything or decides anything.
Hold ⌘ and scroll over the strip to make its cells bigger or smaller — three notches double the size, and it can be taken down a little below the size it opens at. The frame you are on stays centred through the resize, and the size is remembered with the library. A plain scroll scrolls the strip.
Hold the pointer over a cell and it says one sentence: the file, the decision, then — when the frame has them — its rating, favourite, the app's proposal and its colour label. A proposal only ever sits on an undecided frame, so a proposed cell reads like IMG_0102.CR3, undecided, 3 stars, proposed take, a lean, 71%.
The track
Under the strip is a thin track, and it is the whole pass at once, however long the pass is. It is cut into columns, each covering a stretch of frames and coloured by what happened there: the decision the stretch is mostly made of, drawn more solid and brighter the more of the stretch is decided, so a run you have been all the way through stands out more than one you have only started. Where nothing in a stretch has been decided yet, the column shows the app's proposal for it faintly; where there is neither, it stays grey. A proposal never covers a decision, so the track is a picture of what you have done, not of what the app thinks.
Two marks sit over it. The window — an orange rectangle — is the stretch the strip is showing right now; it moves as the strip scrolls and narrows as the cells grow, and it is not drawn when the whole pass already fits. The head — a thin orange mark — is the frame you are on. On a long pass those are rarely the same place.
Press anywhere on the track and drag to scrub: the strip scrolls there and the frame under the pointer becomes the active one, and goes on doing so while you hold the button. A click is the same thing, held for no time at all.
Where you are standing
The pass line, directly under the photograph, says it: a dot in the pass's colour, the pass's name, and your position — ● Takes 12 of 37. The name is the pass's own: the library when nothing narrows it; the state you chose (Undecided frames, Takes, Holds, Rejected frames); a proposal pass's title; or the name on the first chip. The dot is orange while a proposal pass is open, the state's own colour under a state, and neutral otherwise.
Two more things are said there, at the moments they matter. On the last frame of the pass the line adds the last of 37 frames. On the last frame of a group, with the pass going on past it, it adds last of Evening · 21 more. A pass of one frame reads 1 of 1 and adds nothing; an empty one reads 0 frames.
The end of the pass
Press → on the last frame of any pass and one message says so: End of Takes, with what was done underneath — 37 of 37 decided, or 37 of 37 decided · nothing more proposed for a proposal pass — and one button, Show the rest, which opens the frames you have not decided yet. Your chips stay as they were. It is said once per pass, however many times you press →.
Deciding the last frame with auto-advance on says the same, but only when the pass is narrowed — by a state, a mark, a chip, a search or a proposal pass. Over the whole library the decision's own message stays on screen with its Undo, and the pass line already reads the last of 451 frames. In a proposal pass, if the app is still working out new proposals after your decision, Vixlo waits for them: new ones are added to the end of the pass and you move on into them, and if none come, the message comes.