Library and timeline

All your photos and videos live in one library. The Library entry at the top of the sidebar opens it, and the rest of the sidebar takes you to Explore (People, Pets, Memories, Places, Map, Tags, Folders and Documents), Albums, Shared spaces and Tools. Library Care sits at the bottom of the sidebar. On a phone-sized screen, a tab bar at the bottom offers Library, Memories, Albums and Search.

Three layouts

The library has three layouts. Your filters, sort order, selection and scroll position carry over when you switch between them.

Layout	Best for
Browse (the default)	A dense square grid with thin gutters and nothing but the pictures
Timeline	Rows that keep each photo’s shape, with sticky day headers and a year-and-month scrubber you can drag
Work	Going through a shoot: star ratings and rejects always show, and an inspector panel opens beside the grid on wide screens. File names are off by default and can be turned on per device

Group by day, month or year

Group the library by Days, Months, Years or All. Use the D, M and Y keys, Ctrl or ⌘ with the scroll wheel, or pinch on a trackpad or touch screen.

Years and Months appear as cards. Each card’s cover is chosen by Frameleaf’s best-photo score, then your rating, then the newest photo, and shows how many items it holds and its top places. Month cards add a strip of highlights.

Thumbnail size

Change the thumbnail size with a pinch, Ctrl and the scroll wheel, or the + and − keys. A status bar at the bottom shows how many items are in view and how many are selected.

Select and change many at once

• Click a photo’s check mark to select it. Shift-click selects everything in between, and clicking a day header selects that day. Nothing is selected when the page opens.
• The selection bar offers Compare, Quick edit and Open in Studio, plus favourite, add to album, share link, download, stack, change date, description or location, archive, mark sensitive, tag and delete. Deleting can be undone.
• Select all matching selects everything that matches your current filters and shows the count before you act.

The viewer

Open a photo to see it on a black background. Tap or click to hide the controls, and swipe down to close.

Info opens as a panel on a computer or tablet and as a sheet on a phone. You can change the description, date and time zone, location, tags, rating and faces right there. For a photo with text in it, the panel ends with Text in this photo; see Documents and text in photos.

The viewer can also:

• cast to a TV, if you’ve turned on Chromecast (see Casting to a TV)
• copy the image
• play a video’s original or its streaming version
• show a filmstrip, and look around panoramas and 360° photos
• Send a copy… with your device’s share sheet, up to 50 items and 500 MB at a time

How the viewer behaves is up to you. Display original photos, Play original video, Auto play videos and Loop videos are in your app settings; see Account settings.

Slideshow

Start a slideshow from the viewer or an album. Choose a transition: None, Fade (the default), Slide, Ken Burns or Memories. The screen stays awake while it plays, and Reduce Motion switches transitions to fades.

Folders

Folders shows your originals the way they’re stored on disk, with a folder tree on one side and the photos and videos in the selected folder on the other. A path above the photos lets you click your way back up.

Folders is handy when you keep a carefully organised external library or your server uses a tidy storage layout. It’s on by default. To turn it off, or to take it out of the sidebar, go to Settings, then Your preferences, then Features, and change Enable folders or Show Folders in the sidebar.

Photos from external libraries

Your administrator can add folders that already exist on the server, such as a NAS share of old photos, as an external library that belongs to your account. Its photos and videos appear in your timeline and behave like any others: you can open them on the map, add them to albums, favourite and tag them.

A few things work differently:

• Frameleaf reads the files where they are. New or changed files appear after the next library scan. Scans run every night by default, and your administrator can run one at any time.
• A file deleted from disk goes to your trash at the next scan, with a note. Put the file back and the next scan brings the item back; the trash can’t restore or delete it for you. See Trash and large files.
• Albums, descriptions and other changes you make are kept in Frameleaf, and in an .xmp sidecar when the folder is writable. If a file is moved to another folder inside the library, Frameleaf treats it as a new item and those changes are lost. See XMP sidecars.
• Read-only folders can’t be changed from Frameleaf, so you can’t delete those files from the web app.

Setting up external libraries is an administrator job; see External libraries.

Uploads, downloads and the trash

• Upload files or a folder from the top bar, or drag them onto the page. Download gives you an item’s current, edited version, and Download original the untouched file. See Uploads and downloads.
• Deleted items wait in the trash for 30 days by default, and Large files helps you find what takes the most space. See Trash and large files.

Supported formats

Kind	Formats
Photos	AVIF, BMP, GIF, HEIC and HEIF, JPEG (including .insp), JPEG 2000, JPEG XL, MPO, PNG, PSD, RAW, RW2, SVG, TIFF, WebP
Videos	3GP, AVI, FLV, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4 (including .insv), MPEG, MPEG-TS (.mts, .m2ts, .ts), MXF, WebM, WMV

Live Photos and Android motion photos are kept as one item that plays its motion clip.

RAW files

Frameleaf makes previews and thumbnails for camera RAW files. Enhanced RAW rendering is on by default: it uses the preview a camera embeds in the RAW file first, and makes a full render from the RAW data when it needs one. This helps difficult files, such as some .cr2 files, get usable previews. Your administrator can change it in the server’s image settings.

A RAW file the server can’t read isn’t treated as damaged. Library Care lists it separately, so you can tell an unsupported file from a broken one.

Your originals are never changed

Frameleaf never changes your original files. Edits are saved as new versions (see Editing), and descriptions, ratings, dates, locations and tags you change are written to an .xmp sidecar file next to the original (see XMP sidecars).