File Browser

The File Browser tab is where you review your photos, select photos for editing, or perform batch-editing operations. It consists of the following parts:
 * The left panel
 * The "Places" panel on the top links to your home folder, USB card readers, the system's default "photos" folder, or custom folders.
 * Below this is a standard tree-type file browser that you can use to navigate to folders containing your photos. RawTherapee does not complicate things by requiring you to import photos into databases as some other software do.
 * The right panel
 * The "Develop" tab allows you to apply tool settings to the selected image or images. This allows you to quickly enable some tool in many photos at once.
 * The "Inspect" tab shows a preview at a fixed scale of 100% of the image your mouse cursor is hovering over, which is either the largest JPEG image embedded in the raw file, or the image itself when hovering over non-raw images.
 * The "Filter" tab lets you show only photos which match the parameters you specify.
 * The "Fast Export" tab lets you quickly process the selected images by bypassing certain tools even if they are enabled in the processing profiles of those images, so that you can get a quick preview of the raw files for example to delete the shots which are blurry or out of focus.
 * The central panel shows thumbnails of the folder currently selected.

You can hide the individual panels using the "Show/Hide the left panel " and "Show/Hide the right panel " buttons - see the Keyboard Shortcuts page.

When you open a folder, RawTherapee will generate thumbnails of the photos in that folder in the central panel. The first time you open a folder full of raw photo files (we'll refer to folders full of photos as "albums"), RawTherapee will read each file and create a thumbnail based on the embedded JPEG image (every raw photo has an embedded JPEG image, sometimes even a few of various sizes). This can take some time on larger albums, but it only happens the first time you open an album. All subsequent times you go to a previously opened folder, RawTherapee will read the thumbnails from its cache if they exist, and this will be much faster than the first time you opened that folder.

The JPEG image embedded in each raw photo is identical to the out-of-camera JPEG image you would get if you shot in JPEG mode (or in "RAW+JPEG" mode). This JPEG is not representative of the actual raw data in that photo, because your camera applies all kinds of tweaks to the JPEG image, such as increasing the exposure a bit, increasing saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc.

After you start editing a photo, its thumbnail in the File Browser tab is replaced with what you see in the preview in the Editor tab, and every tweak you make is reflected in the thumbnail. The thumbnails are stored in the cache for quick future access. If you want to revert to the embedded JPEG image as the thumbnail, then right-click on the thumbnail (or selection of thumbnails) and select "Processing Profile Operations > Clear".

Use the zoom icons in the File Browser's top toolbar to make the thumbnails smaller or larger. Each thumbnail uses some memory (RAM), so it is advisable not to set the thumbnail size too high ("Preferences > File Browser > Maximal Thumbnail Height").

You can filter the visible photos by using the buttons in the File Browser's or  Filmstrip's top toolbar, as well as by using the "Find" box or the "Filter" tab. Possible uses:
 * Show only unedited photos,
 * Show only photos bracketed +2EV,
 * Show only photos ranked as 5 star,
 * Show only photos with a specific ISO range,
 * Show only photos with a NEF extension.