Sessions
A session is a stretch of a shoot: a run of frames with no long pause between captures. Vixlo cuts the pass you are looking at into them from the capture times in the files, names each one from what it knows about it, and can show them as cards. You need this page when a session is cut in the wrong place, or when you want to know why one is called Afternoon · Rome, Italy.
What a session is
A session is every frame shot in a run, with no gap between one capture and the next longer than the gap you chose. The runs are cut from the frames in the pass, not from the whole library. With the whole library in the pass they are the shoot's sessions. Narrow the pass, to takes, to a person or by a search, and Vixlo cuts the narrower set again: a run can split where the frames you left out used to bridge it, and the session count, the cards and the names change with it. Sessions are worked out from the photographs' own capture times, never stored and never authored: change the gap and every session is re-cut at once, and no file, no decision and nothing in the library moves when it does. A session is a way of looking at the shoot.
A frame with no capture time cannot be placed in a run. It is not dropped: every such frame goes into one session at the end called Undated, so the sessions always add up to the whole pass.
The gap
Vixlo offers four gaps: 15, 30, 45 or 90 minutes. Every library opens at 45; a gap you choose lasts until you close the library. Two places set it:
- In the side panel, the Organise and filter pane's Session gap control, which reads what the gap did: 45 min · 6 sessions. Step it and the reading follows.
- In Frames with Session cards chosen, the header's phrase from the gap between captures, 45 min ▾ opens a menu headed SPLIT SESSIONS ON A GAP with the four choices.
Either way a short message near the foot of the page says the result: Session gap 30 min, and under it 9 sessions from capture time.
What a session is called
A session's name is built only from facts the library holds, joined with dots:
- Who is in it — up to three people you have named in People, the one with the most frames first: Maya, Maya and Noah, Maya, Noah and Ilse. Someone you have not named is left out, so a name is never a guess.
- The time of day it started: morning (from 5 am), midday (noon to 2 pm), afternoon (2 pm to 6 pm), evening (6 pm to 9 pm) or night.
- Where, once the library has any GPS in it: the place most of its frames agree on, named as the Groups pane names it. From the table inside the app that is a city and country, Rome, Italy. With Name places precisely, using Apple's service on for the library, it is Apple's name instead: a finer name — a neighbourhood, a street or a landmark — followed by the city, Trastevere, Rome, or the city and country when Apple has nothing finer. A place with no town in the table near enough to name it is named by its coordinates. Places and journeys has the rest.
So a session reads Maya and Noah · afternoon · Rome, Italy, or Afternoon · Rome, Italy with nobody named, or Maya · evening with no place, or just Afternoon. Name someone in People and every session they are in is renamed. The Undated session keeps its plain name.
The same name is used everywhere a session is said: on its card, on the group heading in Frames when the pass is grouped by Session, which shows the name in capitals, ILSE AND TOM · MORNING, with the count beside it, 8 frames · 2 takes, and in the header above the photograph, which names the session and its day.
Session cards
Session cards is one of the groupings of Frames: one card per session, in capture order, each with a collage, the session's name, the camera bodies and lenses it was shot on, and whether it has the takes you want from it yet. Open Frames (⌘2, or G), then choose Session cards from the header's Grouped by … ▾ menu; you stay on the frame you were on. Session cards covers what a card shows, its target, Resolve gap and the proposal's Accept.