The nine rules
Every proposal names the rule it came from. This page is the rulebook: what each rule reads, what it may propose, and what it will never do. Read it when a reasons card names a rule you want to understand, or before you move a criterion.
What each rule may do
| Rule | May propose | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The sharpness floor | Reject only | A frame measuring under the floor is proposed for the bin. Clearing the floor is never a reason to take anything. |
| The exposure floor | Reject only | A frame far enough under mid-grey that a two-stop lift finds no midtone left is proposed for the bin. A dark photograph whose shadows come back is never proposed. |
| Accidents | Reject only | Extreme light and no subject the Mac's own image analysis can find, together, read as a frame nobody meant to take. Either one alone proposes nothing. |
| One frame per burst | Take and Reject | In a burst the sharpest frame is proposed as the take. The rest are proposed for the bin only if you switch that on. It proposes nothing in a burst it has not measured. A burst is one the camera declared or, when it said nothing, a run of frames Vixlo took for one, though the rule's row says camera-declared. |
| Look-alikes | Reject only | Where two frames are the same picture, the second is proposed for the bin — off until you switch it on. Nothing here says the first is good. |
| Your taste | Take and Reject, as a bet or a lean | What you keep — from what the measurements mean before you have decided anything, and from your own decisions after that. See Your taste. |
| A face too small to judge | nothing | A face smaller than the floor cannot be judged from, so the frame goes on the look-at-these list and nothing is proposed about it. Off until you set a floor. |
| Not measured | nothing | A frame the app could not read at all goes on the look-at-these list with what is missing: Could not be measured — nothing was read from this file, or in a burst In a burst of 5, and not measured — the app will not rank what it has not read. So does a frame it did read when a face was found but no record was kept of where the face sits: A face was found and not mapped — nothing to measure it against. |
| Closed eyes | nothing, ever | Vixlo can measure whether an eye reads closed and never proposes from it. The row is listed so you can see that it is not being used. |
The criteria pane shows the rules in this order, each with what it may propose in its own ink and how many frames it fired on, on this card. See Proposals and criteria. The pane's sentence for Not measured also mentions a frame not read yet, but proposals wait for every frame to be read or to fail, so a frame not read yet never reaches the list. The frames that do are the ones that could not be read and the read ones where a face was found and not mapped.
A floor never produces a Take
The three floors — sharpness, exposure, accidents — say there is no photograph in the file. Clearing a floor is not a reason to keep a photograph, so a floor can only ever propose Reject.
Only two rules may propose a Take: the burst rule, which chooses between alternatives for one moment, and your taste, which leans on a frame no rule spoke about. Where a floor has proposed the bin, your taste does not get a word in beside it.
The floors do not look at a frame that sits in a stack, whether or not Frames shows it stacked: a burst, or look-alike frames at the current Similar photos setting. The stack's rule alone judges them, so a burst's sharpest frame is proposed as the take even when it measures under the sharpness floor, subject 14 against a floor of 30, say. The face floor skips them too. Judge the soft frames of a burst in the Stack Resolver.
What no rule may touch
Two things are out of reach of every rule.
- A frame you have decided. Take, Hold or Reject — while it carries one, nothing is proposed about it, a frame whose proposal you accepted included. Clear the decision with
U, or undo it, and the frame is undecided again and can be proposed about again. - A frame in a set. An exposure bracket or a panorama is one photograph spread across several files. Culling one to a winner destroys it, so nothing in a set is proposed at all, neither as a whole nor in part. The cell in Frames and the Stack Resolver both carry a chip saying so: bracket of 3 · kept whole, panorama of 6 · kept whole. See Sets kept whole.
What ships switched off
Three things ship switched off. Each says why in its own row, in the measurement's own numbers, with what switching it on would do to the card in front of you.
- The rest of a burst is left to you by default. One frame per burst is on and proposes the take; only its other half, proposing the rest of the burst for the bin, is off. In the measurement the defaults were set from, a Reject on the rest of a burst was the costly kind of wrong, because photographers keep more than one frame of a burst often enough. The row ends Switched on, it would propose Reject on N frames of this card. Switched on, the take and each of those Rejects can be a proposed pair in Compare. Your taste can make a pair without it, by leaning towards Reject on a frame of the burst. A proposed pair in Compare has the keys, and what they do when one half is your taste's lean.
- Look-alikes are off by default. In that measurement this rule was wrong both times it could be checked, while firing on 31 frames of one card.
- The face floor is off by default (a floor of 0 is off). A floor of 40 pixels was wrong about ten of the thirteen frames it touched.
Switch any of them on in the criteria pane; it re-proposes only the frames nobody has decided.
These rows word the measurement as if it were yours: across the thirty hand decisions on this Mac, the thirteen frames it touched on this Mac. It is not. The numbers are what the defaults were set from, measured on someone else's culling before Vixlo shipped. The only figure in a row that is about your library is the count of frames of this card.
What is measured
The numbers the rules read are taken once per frame, on this Mac, from the photograph itself, and kept with the library. None of them is a decision. What stays on your Mac lists what is kept.