Photos

The home screen

Photos opens on its own home screen: a tile for Library, Albums, Shared with me, Folders and Upload, the same places as the sidebar beside it on a wide screen. On a phone, where one pane shows at a time, the tiles are the way in, and the first step of the path at the top brings you back to them. A guest sees only Shared with me.

The folders Photos keeps

The first time you open Photos it makes Pictures, Pictures/Upload and Pictures/Albums if they are not there yet, and makes them again if they go missing. Pictures anywhere under Pictures belong to the library, sorted into 2026/10-style folders or not — except what is still in Upload, and the album copies under Albums.

• Upload is the drop folder. Anything put there — by Photos, by a phone's camera upload, by a DAV app — is filed into Pictures/<year>/<month>/ by the day it was taken, a short while after nothing more arrives in its folder. A picture already in your library is not filed twice: the repeat goes to the trash. Files that are not pictures stay where they are. Folders under Upload are never removed, so a phone finds its folder again.
• Albums holds one folder per album.

The library

The library shows every picture newest first, under a heading for each month. A picture the server has not read yet shows a placeholder until it has.

• Open a picture with a click, or with the arrow keys and Enter.
• Select pictures with Space, or Ctrl/⌘-click, or the round tick on a picture; Shift with an arrow key or a click selects a range, Ctrl/⌘+A selects everything shown, Escape lets go. Once something is selected, a click selects too. The bar then offers Add to album, Move to the trash and Clear the selection.
• Folders shows the Pictures tree as it is, for pictures you keep outside the year and month folders.

The viewer and editing

A picture opens over the whole window. The arrow keys go to the one before and after; Escape goes back. Info (key i) shows when it was taken, its size, camera, lens and exposure, where it was taken, its keywords and rating. Edit the details changes the title, description, keywords, rating, date and place — written to a sidecar file beside the picture (IMG_0412.JPG.xmp), which Lightroom, darktable and digiKam read too.

Edit (key e) rotates, flips, crops and straightens a picture. The original is never changed: the edit is kept in the sidecar, and the server makes the edited version from it. Done keeps the edit, Cancel forgets it, and Revert to the original takes every crop, turn and flip away again.

Albums

New album makes an album; Add to album puts copies of the chosen pictures in it. A copy takes no extra space, and adding a picture that is already in the album does nothing. An album's bar holds Share, Export…, Rename album and Delete album (its copies go to the trash; the library keeps every original).

• Changes and albums. When you edit or trash a picture that is in albums, Photos asks — naming the albums — whether to change them too, and remembers your answer if you ask it to. A change made inside an album reaches that album's copy only.
• Sharing an album works like sharing a folder in Files: people, groups and guests, Can view or Can edit. Where the photos were taken is removed from an album's pictures until you choose to keep it, so the people it reaches see no location — and nor do you, in that album.
• Exporting an album downloads it as one ZIP, in its original format (every picture as kept, with its sidecar) or as JPEG with a size and quality you choose. Anyone an album is shared with can export it.

Shared with me, and Upload

Albums other people share with you sit under Shared with me, each with its owner's name — you can look, download and export, and change where the share allows. Upload (Shift+U) takes pictures and whole folders, chosen or dropped, into Pictures/Upload/Photos app/; the screen says how many files are still waiting to be sorted into the library.

Keyboard

Most commands have a key, named beside them in the bar and in the list of keys (?); Preferences changes them. A picture the server cannot read is marked and left out of the count — it stays in your files.