Share review: previews for a client
Share review builds a review collection: one colour-managed JPEG preview per take, 2048 px on the long edge, plus a manifest, in a folder you choose. You send the folder yourself. There is no link, no upload and nothing for a client to log in to.
Opening it
In the ⋯ menu at the end of the views line choose Share…, or choose File ▸ Share…. The dialog is titled Build a review collection and counts your takes: every frame marked Take in the library, whatever the pass on screen is narrowed to. Two rows say what will happen:
- Will write 12 previews + 1 review-collection.json, with Into the folder you choose next · never beside the source card under it.
- Derived JPEG previews only, with RAW files and removed frames never leave this machine.
Building the folder
- Press Build to folder….
- A folder picker opens with the line Choose a folder for the review collection: derived, colour-managed JPEG previews of your takes plus a manifest. Nothing RAW ever leaves this Mac. Choose a folder, or make a new one from the picker, and press Build Here.
- The dialog reads Building the review collection… while it works: Rendering a colour-managed JPEG preview for each take — this can take a moment for a large set.
- Then Review collection written: Wrote 12 colour-managed previews and a manifest for 12 takes. Nothing RAW left this Mac., with the folder's path, Done and Reveal in Finder.
While it builds, the dialog has a Close button. Close hides the dialog but does not stop the build, which carries on writing into the folder. If the build has finished by the time you choose Share… again, the dialog opens on its first page and the report is gone. To see what was written, open the folder and its review-collection.json.
Choose Share… again while the build is still running and the dialog shows its first page with Build to folder… live, as if nothing were under way. Pressing it starts a second build. When the first build ends, the open dialog changes to its report. To avoid all this, leave the dialog open until the report appears.
Never build into the folder your photographs are in, and above all not the Originals folder inside your library. A preview is named after its original with .jpg on the end, so a JPEG there, DSCF1234.JPG, is replaced by its own preview, and on a RAW+JPEG shoot the camera's JPEG beside each RAW is one: on a Mac's disk the two names are one file.
What is written
For each take, one .jpg named after the original, DSCF1234.jpg, 2048 px on the long edge, the same size as every preview in the app, at 90% JPEG quality, with its colour profile embedded.
For a RAW take, the preview is made from the camera's own JPEG inside the RAW file whenever that is 2048 px or larger, the picture you culled from. A client therefore sees the in-camera look, which can differ from what Export delivers. No RAW file is ever copied into the folder: every preview is decoded and written out as a new JPEG, whatever the original was.
The previews are made from the original without your develop settings. A look or an edit you made in Vixlo is not in them.
One review-collection.json names the collection after the folder you chose and lists every take: its file name, its preview's name, its rating, favourite and colour label, and its order in the collection. It also lists any frame that got no preview, with the reason.
Two takes with one name
Unlike Export and Hand off takes, Share review does not check for two takes that would share a file name. Two takes with one name, such as the same IMG_0001.RAF from two cards, or IMG_0001.RAF and IMG_0001.JPG as two takes because Vixlo did not pair them as one shot, get one preview name between them: the second preview replaces the first, and both are counted as written. (A RAW+JPEG pair that Vixlo paired at import is a single take, and is not affected.) To avoid it, keep only one of the two marked Take, or build twice into two folders with a different one of the two each time.
When a frame cannot be rendered
A frame with no usable colour profile, or one that will not decode, gets no preview at all rather than one with the wrong colour. The run continues past it, and the dialog reads Review collection written — with gaps: Wrote 11 of 12 previews. 1 frame could not be rendered — see review-collection.json for why. Nothing RAW left this Mac. The counts under it show how many were written and how many failed.
Folders it refuses
A folder on a removable card or drive is refused, the same as for Export and Hand off takes, and an external drive counts as one: A review collection never writes back to a source card. So is a folder you cannot write to. Either way, nothing is written.