Showing a library as a gallery
The gallery puts the frames you are looking at over the whole screen and plays them. It is for showing a shoot — to a client at the end of the day, or to yourself — and it decides nothing. You need it when you want to see the pass as pictures rather than as a contact sheet.
Opening and leaving
Choose View ▸ Gallery (⌘7). The current pass — whatever the views line is showing, in its order, starting from the frame you are on — fills the screen, above the menu bar and the Dock, and begins to play. Esc, or Leave on the bar, brings the cull page back exactly as you left it, on the same frame.
A pass with nothing in it has no gallery: the menu item is disabled and ⌘7 does nothing.
The bar
Move the pointer and a bar appears along the foot of the screen: Drift, Wall, Strip, Frame, then Pause (or Play), Captions and Leave, each with its key. Leave the pointer still and the bar fades, taking the cursor with it; move it and both are back.
The four presets
Choose one from the bar or with its digit:
| Key | Preset | What it does |
|---|---|---|
1 | Drift | One photograph at a time, filling the screen, drifting slowly — a push in or a pull back, a little sideways travel, never the same way twice in a row — and dissolving into the next after eight seconds. |
2 | Wall | A wall of twelve tiles, four across and three down, on a screen at least 1.55 times as wide as it is tall, such as a 16:9 or 16:10 display; nine tiles, three by three, on a squarer one. Some MacBook screens fall just under that line and show nine. One tile at a time gives way to the next photograph, so the wall is always mostly still. |
3 | Strip | Two rows of frames gliding past each other in opposite directions, the whole pass always in motion and never one frame alone. |
4 | Frame | One photograph, still, on a wide matte with its file name and capture line under it — a print on a gallery wall — held for ten seconds. |
The preset you chose last is remembered, and the gallery opens on it next time.
Drift and Frame, the two that show one photograph at a time, also say where you are in the pass, at the bottom right of the screen — 12 / 84. Drift puts the file name and capture line at the bottom left; Frame puts them under the print. Wall and Strip show no caption and no count.
Keys inside the gallery
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
Space | Pauses and resumes |
← / → | Previous or next photograph. On the Wall, → swaps one tile and ← lays the whole wall again, a wall's worth of frames earlier; on the Strip, six seconds on or back |
1 to 4 | The presets above |
C | Captions on or off — the file name and capture line, on Drift and Frame |
Esc | Leaves |
The captions switch is remembered too. These keys belong to the gallery and are not part of your keyboard preset.
What you see is the developed frame
Every picture carries the frame's adjustments and crop. Drift, Wall and Frame show the same preview the cull draws, and each arrives the way Single's do — the thumbnail the instant it lands, then sharpening in place. The Strip shows thumbnails only, since it keeps many frames moving at once.
Nothing is decided from the gallery
While the gallery is up, every culling key is inert behind it — a T or an R pressed at the screen marks nothing, and Space pauses rather than opening the still full screen. In the menu bar, every culling item is disabled while it plays, and so is Full Screen; View ▸ Leave Gallery stays live. The pass is frozen for the showing, so nothing can reshuffle it while it plays.
Space on the cull page is a different thing: the frame you are on, held still over the whole screen, with the decision keys live and the arrows stepping the pass. The gallery plays and decides nothing; full screen holds one photograph and lets you decide about that photograph, over Compare too. Full screen covers it.