Photomator 3.4 introduces photo culling with flags, star ratings, and advanced filtering

[Samanta]

Photomator 3.4 is out now! Flag favorites, reject unwanted shots, add star ratings, search photos with advanced filters, and enjoy many more great features.

Learn more in this blog post.

[espiox]

I've been waiting for Flag/Reject in Photomator for so long! Thank you for adding it. I won't lie though, I'm really disappointed that so much of this update is only applicable to Mac. Please add better photo search/filtering and faster flagging from the photo viewer to iPad!

[[email protected]]

ipad上的克隆功能和导出的框为什么迟迟没有啊，mac上面已经很早就有了！

[Samanta]

I've been waiting for Flag/Reject in Photomator for so long! Thank you for adding it. I won't lie though, I'm really disappointed that so much of this update is only applicable to Mac - please add better photo reviewing and a way to flag from the photo viewer to iPad!

Flags and star ratings are also available on iPad and iPhone!

[espiox]

Flags and star ratings are also available on iPad and iPhone!

Sorry, my original message wasn't clear, I've edited it. I'm really happy that flagging/rating is on iPad, but I'm hoping you can bring photo filtering and other ways of flagging and rating to iPad too. The current method of longpress > tap Flag > tap Flagged/Rejected is a little cumbersome for quick reviewing. Maybe an up/down swipe gesture or something?

Also, something I've been wanting for a while is the ability to see a photo in the "All Photos" view (the Apple Photos app has this feature). It can be really useful when a photo is in a folder (like the new Flag / Star folders) and I want to see other photos taken at the same time for comparison.

Thanks for your hard work!

[Martin Chalifoux]

Very disappointed with this release. All it does is adding some flags and filters which is too basic. It provides no tool to properly judge images and decide which to keep or discard. All you have is the image itself. That is pointless. What was needed is also the following
- have the histogram and megatadata visible to juste the exposure, ideally with clipping indicators
- have a way to judge sharpness, at least with a quick zoom or better with edge detection overlays
- have a way to compare images intelligently. There is no compare tool. When one cull a shoot, there are often sequences of images or burst of images out of which one best shot must be selected. Nothing here help doing that.

And that critique is for the Mac. Because on the iPad the new features are not even available in the File Browser mode. So the file browser mode ont he iPad is essentially unusable and always have been.

Add to that the fact that Photomator still have NO lens correction for cannon RF glass when Editing RAW, because Apple do not provide it and they won't implement their own, and I am left with a very disappointing app that I bought a year ago but will likely give-up using.

[Martin Chalifoux]

Flags and star ratings are also available on iPad and iPhone!

But it says only on Photos mode, not in File Browser mode so your answer is misleading.

[Lieven Lema]

Nice update, removing in files mode doesn't work so organizing is not yet in full mode it seems.
Edited: working on a network drive it doesn't work, on a external disk it's ok.
Edit 2: deletion works, Photomator only shows it after restarting, so there's a little updating problem, and even then only in the utilities/rejected folder.

[Yad]

Can it read star ratings directly from the camera on import?

[Andrius]

Nice update, removing in files mode doesn't work so organizing is not yet in full mode it seems.

Hi there, could you get in touch with us about this issue? We'll take a look at what's going wrong.

Can it read star ratings directly from the camera on import?

If the rating is embedded in the metadata, it absolutely should! If, for some reason, that's not working even though the rating is in the metadata, do let us know using the support link above and we'll see what we can do.

Very disappointed with this release. All it does is adding some flags and filters which is too basic. It provides no tool to properly judge images and decide which to keep or discard. All you have is the image itself. That is pointless. What was needed is also the following
- have the histogram and megatadata visible to juste the exposure, ideally with clipping indicators
- have a way to judge sharpness, at least with a quick zoom or better with edge detection overlays
- have a way to compare images intelligently. There is no compare tool. When one cull a shoot, there are often sequences of images or burst of images out of which one best shot must be selected. Nothing here help doing that.

And that critique is for the Mac. Because on the iPad the new features are not even available in the File Browser mode. So the file browser mode ont he iPad is essentially unusable and always have been.

Add to that the fact that Photomator still have NO lens correction for cannon RF glass when Editing RAW, because Apple do not provide it and they won't implement their own, and I am left with a very disappointing app that I bought a year ago but will likely give-up using.

Appreciate the candid feedback – we'd absolutely love to keep improving the culling features, but the first step was always going to be the most essential tools for managing larger collections of photos – and that's starring, flagging, and filtering. Doing something similar to what you've suggested along with what came in this update would have taken a significant amount of time. Most likely more than double how long this update took. So our approach is to make changes more incrementally rather than going silent for long periods of time. I can't say whether we'll be able to bring suggestions similar to yours to Photomator, but we do hear and listen to pretty much every bit of feedback on here (even if we don't reply).

As for the Files browser mode on iPad, that's a tricky situation. To display ratings and flags, we'd need to build a custom browser rather than using the system browser and that's not currently in our plans. However, that's something we can absolutely keep in mind for the future.

[grattebitume]

I was looking forward to this feature. Thank you
On iPad, you must select several photos to evaluate them with the stars or the flag. It's faster.

[Bence Foltanyi]

Regarding the iPad file browser:
Could you at least add the option to set ratings and flags in the file browser? (Without the filter display, which is tricky)

[Yad]

Thank you @Andrius. Can’t wait to try it!

[Lorenzo Viola]

That’s an amazing release thank you!
I love how Photomator is slowly becoming as powerful as Lightroom.
Just one thing I would love to see in the near future is to have a lens correction tool that would change in base of the camera/lens used.

[Sondre]

Thanks for a great update.

One suggestion: Make it possible to flag/reject on iPad also when viewing a photo (after tapping it in the browser). Preferably with keyboard shortcuts so it can be done using Bluetooth keyboard/Magic Keyboard etc. No one will cull a shoot on the iPad if you have to stay in the browser and press, hold, enter a menu, tap Flag, and then for the next photo do the exact same thing. It is just too slow and cumbersome.

Do the flags and ratings sync over the iCloud Photo Library when using the Photos option?

As one mentioned above, I would also love the option to compare two photos side-by-side and having synchronized zoom to see the difference between two similar photos in terms of sharpness etc. Nitro Photo has this.

[espiox]

One suggestion: Make it possible to flag/reject on iPad also when viewing a photo (after tapping it in the browser). Preferably with keyboard shortcuts so it can be done using Bluetooth keyboard/Magic Keyboard etc. No one will cull a shoot on the iPad if you have to stay in the browser and press, hold, enter a menu, tap Flag, and then for the next photo do the exact same thing. It is just too slow and cumbersome.

iPad does support keyboard shortcuts for flagging and rating, but it definitely needs a quicker method for folks who don’t regularly keep a keyboard connected.

[Rick Williams]

Good start to a feature I have wanted. I just kind of want to reiterate what a few others are saying here. I would really appreciate a way to quickly flag and star photos while swiping through in the full screen view. That is how I usually cull my photos.

[JohneChambers]

I guess with the new features you have to start somewhere but unfortunately it doesn’t provide the functionality I was hoping for with this update. I was really hoping for the ability to flag and star rate images from the Photomator files browser on the iPad. Having the ability to do that would have allowed me to do some precursor culling providing the ratings assigned were then visible in my main organisational tool which is Photo Mechanic Plus. I don’t send an image to my photos library until I have completed my post processing workflow. For now I will just have to continue my current workflow using my laptop to cull and rate. No doubt as time goes by Photomator will eventually implement these features in a more advanced form.

Just had look at the Mac version of the update and it does what I was hoping for so in the Files Browser please bring the same functionality to iPad and it would in my case provide a very useful feature update and give me the culling flexibility I am hoping for in Photomator. You are on the right track but some way to go yet!

[Juhani]

Thank you for the update! It's great to see that you keep making the app better and I appreciate the new features. However, as others have also pointed out, I think to make the culling features truly usable, you also need to upgrade the way we can view and compare images with one another, which forms the basis for any rating decisions.

Exposure and composition we can still work with and improve, but especially sharpness we have to judge at 100% zoom level and is what often makes or breaks the shot. Say you have 10 macro photos of the same subject from which you want to choose the best shot with the best focus and sharpness. Doing this in Photomator is still extremely frustrating experience at the moment, since every time you zoom in a shot to a particular area and then change to another image to compare, the program throws you out again to the Zoom to Fit view. Furthermore, it is not even possible to select two or more shots that are not right next to each another in the browser/filmstrip and cycle through them, which is insane. I mean, even Apple Photos can do this (if you preselect the shots, not using the filmstrip), but not Photomator. If you fix these things, at the very least, then we have covered the absolute basics for proper culling. Of course a dedicated comparing mode or tools (with clipping indicators, focus peaking etc) would be even better.

Still nice to see some new progress and hope more is on our way soon. Keep up the good work!

[SKR Imaging]

I was glad to see this update to Photomator but being someone who is exclusively editing on iPad and iPhone, I was disappointed to see that setting a flag or star rating was not possible in the full view of the photo. Rating and flagging in the album view (as it is currently implemented) is not a feasible workflow as you cannot ascertain the issues of the photo (blurring or other) without zooming in.

I feel that a gesture to allow user to set a flag and star rating in full view would make culling photos a breeze.. Something like a tap and hold on the photo when in full view mode (regardless of zoom value) to reveal a quick rating menu that can allow user to then continue swiping to set star rating and flag /reject. Once that is done, user can simply swipe left or right to move on to the view the other photo in their culling endeavour while remaining in the full view (preferably the same zoom level as the previous photo). I remember Aperture behaving this way for the zoom level being retained when comparing multiple photos in full view.

The mobile app is the perfect place to sit down and cull images (be it the iPhone or iPad) so I feel it could be so much better now that the star ratings system is in place if it had these mentioned suggestions.

Thanks again for the awesome work the team has put into this great app and looking forward for future improvements to be able to use it as my main culling software instead of relying on other tools.

[Brrrendan]

Disappointed to see that there’s no ab comparison tool. This is a main workflow for culling, have the select on the left and select/reject through a stack of similar images. Oh well, maybe someday.

For those looking for a solution on iOS, Photoscope is decent.

[Brrrendan]

Thanks for a great update.

One suggestion: Make it possible to flag/reject on iPad also when viewing a photo (after tapping it in the browser). Preferably with keyboard shortcuts so it can be done using Bluetooth keyboard/Magic Keyboard etc. No one will cull a shoot on the iPad if you have to stay in the browser and press, hold, enter a menu, tap Flag, and then for the next photo do the exact same thing. It is just too slow and cumbersome.

Do the flags and ratings sync over the iCloud Photo Library when using the Photos option?

As one mentioned above, I would also love the option to compare two photos side-by-side and having synchronized zoom to see the difference between two similar photos in terms of sharpness etc. Nitro Photo has this.

Thanks for sharing about Nitro Photo. I had used RAW Power but didn’t know about this new app.

[SKR Imaging]

For those looking for a solution on iOS, Photoscope is decent.

Thanks for this! I just discovered Photoscope and will definitely be using going forward to cull shoots imported to my iPad Photo Library until Photomator can gain this type of zoom comparison feature.

Also would have been great if there was a way to cull from SD cardor external storage (Files app browser view) before importing to iPad.

[torch]

Disappointed to see that there’s no ab comparison tool. This is a main workflow for culling, have the select on the left and select/reject through a stack of similar images. Oh well, maybe someday.

For those looking for a solution on iOS, Photoscope is decent.

Nice to see that Photomator has it, finally!

For those who are unsure here is how I did it before:

Phoom Foto Manager & Cleaner is awesome. Just create a YES and NO album in Apple Photos App, and cycle through all photos by tapping YES or NO. It is even auto forwarding after each tap. You can then batch delete the discarded ones or review the “to be deleted trash” before if you struggle and you are unsure. Bonus: Review Live Photos as well. I combine this using Find: A modern photo manager which auto updates every album based on rules (for example Day 01 for your holidays, Day 02, etc.).

And of course you can invent something different, rating albums named 1* / … / 5*. It’s up to you. Also nice for cross app workflows.

[Martin Chalifoux]

I was glad to see this update to Photomator but being someone who is exclusively editing on iPad and iPhone, I was disappointed to see that setting a flag or star rating was not possible in the full view of the photo. Rating and flagging in the album view (as it is currently implemented) is not a feasible workflow as you cannot ascertain the issues of the photo (blurring or other) without zooming in.

And if you are using the File Browser instead of the Photos Library on iPad, you get none of the rating and filtering features. More and more the iPad version do not get all the features added to the Mac version.