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A library is a folder

A library you make in Vixlo is one folder you chose. Unless you change the review's Working library row, it holds its own copies of the photographs and everything the app knows about them; the box below says what changes if you do. This page says which files in it carry your work and which can be measured again; The index can be rebuilt says why losing the index loses so little, and What a library is on disk lists every file.

One folder, one library​

The launch screen's card says it: One folder, one library, and under it Catalog, previews and decisions sit together so a library can be moved or backed up as a unit. The index records where each photograph is relative to the folder. Copy the folder to another drive, open it there with Open existing library…, and it is the same library. With the review's Working library row left where it starts, nothing it needs lives anywhere else: the list on the launch screen is only a list, and Vixlo's own folder holds things about you rather than about any shoot — your keyboard map, and what proposals have learned from your decisions.

The launch screen's How a library works card, headed One folder, one library

The folder picker opened by Open existing library…, with its message

In Vixlo 0.1

Choose… on the review's Working library row accepts a folder outside the library's own folder, and that import's copies go there. The index then points at copies that are not in the library's folder: they get no .xmp file, a rebuild does not find them, Empty bin… refuses them, and copying the library folder to another drive leaves them behind. Leave the row on the library's own Originals folder. If you have already done it, scan the same card or folder again with the row on Originals, and every frame Vixlo can match to its photograph is pointed at a copy inside the library (Scanning a card again). Your originals are never changed has the rest.

What carries your work​

These hold things you made, and nothing else can make them again:

  • Originals/ — the verified copies of your photographs, byte for byte as they came off the card, both files of a RAW+JPEG pair among them.
  • The .xmp file beside each photograph you have touched — the decision and when it was made, the rating, the colour label, keywords and caption, the note on the decision and its reasons, and every develop setting. The one mark it does not carry is the heart on a favourite.
  • What you made inside Vixlo, in small files of their own: the names you gave people, the faces you confirmed or took away from someone, and the ones you marked Not a face (People/index.json); your saved searches (Searches/saved.json); the simulations you saved (looks.json); and the criteria you set for proposals (Proposals/policy.json). Delete one of these and what it held is gone — a new scan finds the faces again, but not their names, and the criteria go back to where they start.
  • library.json — the library's own record, with its name. It is what makes the folder a library: without it, Open existing library… will not open the folder, and a missing index cannot be rebuilt.

Back up the whole folder and you have backed up the shoot and the cull.

tip

If your backup tool skips files by size or type, check that it takes the .xmp files in Originals/ and the small files at the top of the library folder. They are tiny, and they are the cull.

What can be measured again​

The rest of the folder was computed from the photographs and can be computed again:

  • library.sqlite3, the index — what makes a ten-thousand-frame library open and search quickly. Almost everything in it is also in the .xmp files, with three exceptions: the undo journal, your favourites, and the pass you had open.
  • Search/, Places/, Sets/, and the face prints in People/ — what each frame is of, places and journeys, brackets and panoramas, and how each face looks.
  • Proposals/measurements.json and Proposals/adjustment.json — what the app read off each photograph, and one number about how this shoot was culled. Numbers — sharpness, faces and how well each was captured, how much of the frame is crushed or blown, the mean brightness, whether a subject was found — kept with the file's size and date, and a fingerprint of its contents where the library has recorded one. No pixels and no thumbnail, and nothing in them is a decision. They do name the photographs: each entry is filed under the frame's id. For a photograph copied in from a card or a folder, the id is a fingerprint of its contents, which says nothing about where the file was. A frame an older build scanned in has the path its file had when it was scanned, usually a path on the card ending in the file's name, and one a rebuild found has a path inside Originals/.

Delete any of these and the app measures the shoot again the next time the library opens. The cost is time. One exception: with precise place names on, Places/ also keeps the names Apple's service sent back, so deleting it sends those coordinates to Apple again (What leaves this Mac, and when).