Glossary
Vixlo has its own words for a few things, and this guide uses them exactly as the app shows them. This page says what each one means, grouped by where you meet it. A term that is a link opens the page that covers it.
Deciding
Take — the first of the three decisions: this one stays. Green, key T in the Vixlo preset. Your takes are every frame marked Take, and they are what Edit takes, Export, Hand off and Share review work on. Search spells a take status:pick.
Hold — not yet: come back to it. Amber, key H. The Holds chip collects them.
Reject — out of the queue and into the bin. Red, key R. A Reject deletes nothing.
Undecided — no decision yet, the state every frame starts in. U puts a frame back to it.
Mark — a star rating, the favourite heart or a colour label. Marks are separate from the decision and from each other.
The bin — where rejected frames wait: out of the queue, still on disk, restorable. The Rejects chip shows it. Empty bin… is the one action in Vixlo that deletes a photograph.
Bin rule — what a library says should happen to the bin when a cull is finalised. In Vixlo 0.1 it is shown but not acted on.
The cull page
The pass — the ordered frames you are walking: the whole library, or whatever the views line narrows it to. It holds still while you decide.
Single — one photograph at a time, where culling happens (⌘1). Frames — the whole pass as one contact sheet (⌘2). G goes between the two.
Pass line and views line — the two bands under the photograph. The pass line names the pass and your place in it, and holds the decision buttons; the views line holds Single · Frames, the state chips, your other chips, Edit takes and the ⋯ menu.
Chip — one narrowing of the pass on the views line, such as a state, a person, a place, a mark or a search, each with its own ×.
The strip — the row of small cells along the bottom: every frame in the pass, the one you are on ringed. The held keys map calls it the roll. On the edit page the strip holds your takes.
The track — the thin band under the strip: the whole pass at once, with the stretch on screen and the frame you are on marked over it. Press and drag on it to scrub.
Focus check — the photograph at twice the fitted size, about the centre: tap Z, or hold it to peek. The loupe is the same Z held over a cell in Frames.
Stack — similar frames, a burst say, behind one cover in Frames. The Stack Resolver opens one so you can look inside and choose. A set, an exposure bracket or a panorama, is kept whole: the Similar photos slider never cuts it.
Compare — C: the frame you are on at the left, beside the best other frame Vixlo can find at the right, for choosing between them. It measures sharpness and decides nothing. Its keys, and how it behaves when you want to leave, are on Keys in Compare.
Candidate — the card headed CANDIDATE at the left of Compare: the frame you are on. Every decision key acts on it and never on the frame at the right.
Linked and Independent — the first of Compare's two buttons. Linked, the default, enlarges both photographs together; Independent enlarges only the candidate. The other button reads 100% or Fit.
Photo sources — the dialog opened by ⋯ ▸ Photo sources…. It credits the demonstration photographs that ship with the app, which are the photographs of the three Earlier library rows.
Your keys — the list of shortcuts at the foot of the side panel's rail. Tap ? to open it; hold ? for the whole map.
Organising a shoot
Groups — the side panel's first pane: the shoot as a tree in the grouping you chose, with its people, places and saved searches.
Session — a run of frames with no gap between captures longer than the session gap: 15, 30, 45 or 90 minutes. Named from the people in it, the time of day and the place.
Session card — one session drawn as a card in Frames, with a collage and its coverage: how many takes it has against the target you set.
Set — frames that are one photograph spread across several files: an exposure bracket, a panorama or an HDR panorama. Vixlo finds them from the exposure of each frame and the picture itself, by fixed rules, keeps each as one stack, and marks its cover with a chip such as bracket of 3 · kept whole. A set decides nothing.
Import label — the short label an import files each frame under: a day and a length such as 14 Jun · 42 min, or Undated for a frame with no capture time. Vixlo 0.1 shows it on screen only on Session cards, when no frame in the pass has a capture time; group: searches it. The frames filed together at import are an import group, which Compare's BEST IN THIS SESSION and ⌘↩ in Frames work from, and which need not match the sessions Frames draws.
Import state — the chip beside the file name in the header: New, Previously imported or Possible duplicate. In Vixlo 0.1 a library you made yourself shows only New.
Place and journey — a place is somewhere at least four frames were taken within about 5 km of one another, named city, country from a table inside the app; a journey is a run of frames spanning at least 50 km, named after its busiest leg, such as Journey to Florence — June 2024. The Groups pane lists both under PLACES when a library holds location data.
Saved search — a search kept under a name in the Groups pane, under SAVED SEARCHES, with a live count. It keeps the words, not the frames. Save view in Organise and filter writes one from the narrowing on screen.
People — the faces in a library, gathered on this Mac into one circle per person. In this frame shows close-ups of every face in the photograph on Single.
Face model — an optional model on the Mac that lets People group faces by the face itself (grouped by face) rather than by hair, glasses and clothes (grouped by look). Vixlo ships none, and Vixlo 0.1 has no way to add one from the app. The Models sheet calls it a recogniser.
Models sheet — Vixlo ▸ Models…: the models installed on this Mac, what each is for (Faces, Words or Cleaning), its licence and terms, and a Remove for each. It lists and removes; it does not install.
Proposals
Proposal — what the app would do with a frame you have not decided: a dashed mark and a reason, never a decision. Look at these is the list of frames it will not call, with what is missing.
Measuring — the numbers Vixlo reads off every frame once, in the background, as a library opens. Proposals appear only when the whole library has been measured; View ▸ Measure for proposals starts it by hand. Measuring decides nothing.
Proposed pair — two undecided frames from one stack in Compare, one proposed as the Take and the other for the bin. ↩ accepts the pair as proposed, ⇧↩ keeps the other one, and H holds both.
Criteria — this library's settings for the rules proposals come from, in the Proposals and criteria pane. A floor is a rule that can only propose Reject.
Your taste — what Vixlo learns from your decisions. A bet is its confident mark, on a solid disc; a lean is a weaker one, drawn hollow. The reasons card (E) spells out any proposal in words.
Developing
Edit page — where you develop your takes, one after another (⇧⌘E).
Top panel — the row across the top of the edit page: the tools you use on the photograph, the zoom rungs, the viewing aids and the four AI tools. The develop panel is the column of sliders on the right, in six tabs.
Develop panel in Single — the smaller panel that the Develop button opens beside the photograph in Single: the six film simulations, the eight tonal sliders and Reset, with no looks, crop or masks. It works on any frame in the pass. Its Edited badge shows when the frame carries a film simulation or one of the eight sliders is away from 0.
Film simulation and look — a film simulation is one of six base renderings: Classic Chrome, Provia, Acros, Astia, Velvia and Eterna. A look is a film simulation with a tonal adjustment on top, under one name; twenty-four ship with the app. Single's develop panel offers the six simulations without the looks.
Camera JPEG — the JPEG a camera embeds in every RAW file. Vixlo shows it for a RAW frame you have not developed. For a developed one the cull page shows it only when this Mac has no decoder for the camera, with no adjustments applied, and the edit page says so along the bottom of its canvas: This Mac cannot develop this RAW file — showing the camera JPEG.
Sending takes out
Export — full-size JPEG or TIFF files of your takes, rendered with your develop settings. Its engines are Fast, which carries every setting, and Max quality, which hands RAW files to darktable.
Export preset — a delivery recipe saved under a name: format, quality, size, colour space, rename and subfolder patterns and a watermark. Three come with Vixlo; yours are kept in export-presets.json, and a few settings can only be written there by hand.
Token — a word in braces in a Rename or Subfolder pattern, such as {date} or {seq:3}, that Vixlo replaces with the take's own detail.
Watermark — text drawn into an exported file only, never into an original, a sidecar or a preview. A preset can also hold a logo, and a size and margin of your own.
Hand off — Hand off takes… (⌘E) writes an XMP file per take and a decisions.json for another editor, and no images.
Sidecar — the word the Export and Hand off dialogs use for the .xmp file they write for a take. An editor pairs it with a photograph by name and folder: DSCF1234.xmp beside DSCF1234.RAF.
Share review — a folder of 2048 px previews of your takes, with a manifest, for you to send to a client.
Libraries and files
Library — one folder for one shoot: its index, every decision and its own verified copy of the photographs.
Review this import — the sheet every import opens on, from the wizard or a card added later. Under its four counts are the two destinations: Working library, the folder the photographs are copied into, which starts as the library's own Originals folder, and Backup — a separate drive, the optional second copy a card needs before it can read safe to format.
Copied in and referenced — the first standing fact at the foot of the side panel: Photographs copied in when every frame's file is inside the library's folder, Originals referenced when every one is outside it, or a count of each. A frame is referenced when its file is outside the library's folder; scan its card into the library again and Vixlo copies it in, keeping its decisions (Scanning a card again).
Launch screen — what Vixlo opens onto when no library is open: every library this Mac knows, and where a new one is made.
New library card — the card at the top right of the launch screen where a library starts: Choose location…, a detected card, Open existing library… and recent locations.
Earlier library — one of three rows bundled inside the app. They can be culled but not developed until imported with Import this library….
Earlier build — the build of Vixlo that ran on some Macs before this one. If it left culling sessions behind, the first library you open offers once to bring their decisions across: Import old decisions does it, and Not now declines.
Originals — the library's verified copies of your photographs, in its Originals folder. Nothing in Vixlo ever rewrites them.
XMP file — the small .xmp file beside each photograph you have decided, rated, labelled, keyworded, noted or developed. It holds the decision, the rating, the colour label, keywords, caption, note and every develop setting; the favourite heart lives in the index alone. Export and Hand off write files of the same kind, and their dialogs call them sidecars.
Index — library.sqlite3, the file that makes a library fast to open and search. It can be rebuilt from the folder.
Saved · Not saved — the words at the right of the cull page's title bar that say whether the last write to the library reached the disk: Saved with a tick, or Not saved in red. The red copy also stands on the views line, in front of Edit takes.
library.json — the library's own record, in its folder, with its name and when it was last opened. It is what makes a folder a library: Open existing library… turns down a folder without it, and says nothing.
Safe to format — what the import's last panel says only once every new file has two independently verified copies on two different drives and no clip or other file the import does not copy is left on the card. Vixlo never formats a card.
Settings and keys
Settings window — the window of its own at Vixlo ▸ Settings… (⌘,): your account, text size, Ollama, cloud providers, the credit on exported files, Local only and the diagnostic log. The keys you cull with are not in it.
Keyboard sheet — the sheet at Vixlo ▸ Keyboard… where every key is listed and changed and the keys preset is chosen. It opens with a library open or from the launch screen. Your keys is where the same keys are read.
Keys preset — one of three ready-made keyboards, Vixlo, Lightroom or Photo Mechanic, chosen from the cards at the top of the Keyboard sheet. They differ only in the keys for Take and Reject. The Your keys answer in Settings' Account section is not a preset: it only records what you answered on the website.
Your account
Trial — seven days of the whole app, from the moment you confirm your email. Complimentary access is the whole app from an invite code, for some months or with no end date.
Read-only — the state when the account no longer unlocks the app. Every library opens and Export, Hand off and Share review still work; culling and developing wait.
Notice under the title bar — the band under the title bar, on the launch screen and the cull page, that says where the account stands: a trial's countdown, complimentary access in its last week, a failed payment, or the lock notice when Vixlo is read-only. A subscription shows none. It is not the strip, the row of frames along the bottom.
Account page — the page on the website where your plan, your Macs, your answers and the account's deletion live. The app calls the website the portal.
Delete your account — the account page's last panel. It removes the account, its Macs, your answers and any invite codes on it at once and for good, and cancels a running subscription without a refund. Your libraries are untouched. An account made again with the same address is a new account, with a new seven-day trial.