Fotusa — manual

Where your work lives

This is the question that matters most, so it comes first: what do you lose if this program stops existing?

Your photos stay where they are. Fotusa copies nothing into a store of its own and moves nothing by itself. What you see is your own folder structure. The library is an index, not a repository.

What you enter — names, albums, captions, locations — sits beside the photos, per folder, in a hidden folder:

.Fotusa - reservekopie van je werk\jouw werk in fotusa.json

One folder of photos is therefore enough on its own to know who is in them. There is no central list being pointed at — which is exactly what cost people their names the moment their old photo manager’s database went.

That folder holds more than names: it also holds what you already fetched from your phone or camera, because that too is work that exists nowhere else. The files are named namen bij gezichten.json, al opgehaald van je apparaten.json and NIET WEGGOOIEN - hierin staat je werk in Fotusa.txt — the warning sits in the name, because a readme is rarely opened. They are also set read-only, so Windows asks first.

Names also go into the photo itself, as XMP, the moment you confirm them. They travel to any other program that reads metadata.

The index, the thumbnails and the search vectors sit apart, and those are replaceable:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Fotusa

What the app changes about your files

Everything that touches files asks first, with the count in it. The app never deletes anything by itself and never moves anything by itself.

Writing a tag must never quietly recompress your photo: every write checks afterwards that the pixels were left alone.

Names are the exception to "everything goes into the file". Those are guessed, and a guess is never written into someone's photo unasked. Only once you confirm a suggestion does the name go into the file. If you want every name written into the files in one go, that is what the Write names to this file button is for.

Getting started

• Menu top right → Choose folders: tick the folders that take part. The tree starts at your drives, so everything is reachable.
• Several source folders can sit side by side, for instance a drive plus an external one. A second source folder is added, not substituted.
• Reading in runs in the background. You can work straight away; whatever has not been looked at yet arrives as it goes.
• Face finding and image search run after that, also in the background. The work lines at the bottom left show how far along they are.

On a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos that first round takes hours. It happens in the background and the app stays usable throughout — you do not have to watch it. Every later start only scans what changed.

You can rescan one folder with a right-click in the tree (subfolders come along), or everything at once from the menu. Files that disappeared leave the index; new and changed ones are processed again.

The three panels

The screen follows the classic layout of three panels. You drag the column widths at the divider; a double click puts one back at its starting width, and the width is kept between sessions.

The left groups, the right shows. The left panel is about collections — favourites, people, albums, folders — and clicking filters the view. The right panel is about the single photo you are looking at, so clicking there never jumps to another view. A name on a face is text there, not a button. All photos of that person are on the left.

Click a folder and you see that folder plus everything under it, split into blocks with the folder name above them. There is deliberately no date in that heading: a folder's date says nothing, because copying sets it to today. The other views — all, month, album, favourites, search — stay flat, because folder headings would cut straight through your selection there.

A double click opens the photo in the lightbox, and that fills the middle panel — left and right stay in view. The wheel zooms, dragging looks around, and the caption is edited straight in the box below the photo.

Faces and people

The app asks only about people you named yourself: "is this Anna?" — never "who is this?" about a stranger. That difference decides whether the work is doable at all. A yes-or-no question about someone you know costs a tap; a bin of thousands of nameless faces costs an evening.

You give a name on the photo itself: open it, tab Faces, and type in the box under the frame. Detection runs in the background, but a face without a name stays without one until you give it one.

Working through one person after that:

• Click a name on the left. The middle shows their heads: the confirmed ones first, then the suggestions.
• Under a suggestion sit ✓ and ✕. In the bar above the people the same marks do it for all of them at once — with a question first, because there can be hundreds.
• tips shows only the open suggestions, ? only the confirmed heads that resemble the rest poorly. ← All thumbnails brings you back.
• ⟳ searches again for faces of this person and puts everything in order.
• Right-click a head: move to another person, set as portrait, or remove.

On a video you add the people who appear in it, with their portrait beside them. They count towards that person: click a name on the left and the video sits in their list.

Searching by image

Type in the header. The app reads your sentence and splits it into parts — a name, a place, a year, a word about what is in the picture. Those parts appear under the field; if one is wrong, click it away.

Image search works on what the photo shows: "a temple", "snow", "black dog". There is no category list for anyone to maintain — any word works, including one never typed before.

This asks for one round of background work over your whole collection, and a 2.3 GB model the app fetches itself from the menu. Until that is done, search works on whatever has been looked at. The model runs on your own machine; no photo goes out.

Beside image search, everything stays findable by tag, caption, file name, place, folder, album and year, with a filter by type.

Arranging

• One click selects, a double click opens. Ctrl adds, Shift picks a run.
• Sorting sits bottom left: by date or by name, another click reverses it.
• The slider bottom right changes the thumbnail size; Ctrl with the wheel does the same.
• Below the grid sit In album, Delete and Collage. They act on what you picked, and on everything in view when you picked nothing.

Dragging onto a folder moves the file, Ctrl copies it — as in Explorer. The file really does move. That only happens when you do it; the app never moves anything by itself.

• Only within your source folders. Between two source folders is fine, outside them is not — the photo would leave your library.
• If a file of that name is already there, the app asks what should happen: keep both, skip this one, or replace. With several clashes there is a "Do this for all the rest" tick box underneath.
• Replacing never deletes permanently: the existing file goes to the Windows recycle bin first.
• Tags, caption, star, face names and albums travel along. A copy gets everything except the album — that is a collection you put together yourself.

Albums are virtual: a free selection independent of the folder structure. A photo can sit in no album, one, or several, and the files stay where they are. Deleting an album therefore deletes no photos. Sorting can be by date, by name, or by hand through dragging. Favourites are a star per photo, and that goes into the file as an XMP rating.

Tags are free and have autocomplete; tagging can be done in bulk on a selection. Captions are multi-line. The date comes from EXIF; if it is missing, the file date is used with the mark date uncertain — and that uncertain date is deliberately not written into the file. Dates can be corrected in bulk too, set or shifted, for scans and a wrongly set camera clock.

Fetching from a phone or card

At the bottom of the left column sits Fetch photos from a device. On the left you choose the folder they land in — you point at it, Fotusa never creates folders itself. On the right sits what is on the device, as a list of names or as thumbnails.

• Works with any folder on disk: USB stick, memory card, card reader, camera.
• Nothing is written to the device — it is only read and pulled across.
• Give the device a name and Fotusa remembers what you already fetched. Those photos get a mark; they do not disappear from the list, so you can deliberately fetch them again. One button selects everything you do not have yet.
• That mark stays right even if you delete the photo from your pc or edit it and save it under another name — the history hangs on the device, not on a file.
• Without a name it is a one-off transfer: browse, select, copy, done.
• If a file of the same name is already there, it is skipped.

That record of what you already fetched sits beside your photos, in the same backup folder as your names. It survives a reinstall.

Duplicates

Menu → Find duplicate photos. A window asks first what should be searched: photos, videos, by size, by capture date or by image. The app compares content, not names.

Even across a collection of hundreds of thousands of files that is a matter of seconds. It runs on a pool of its own with a progress bar, so the app stays usable meanwhile.

The copies sit side by side in columns, with folder, file name, size and date underneath and a button per file. Clicking the photo opens it, so you can check what you are throwing away. Right-click the copy that may go: tick every duplicate in that folder, or only those that also sit in the other folder of that pair. Shift picks a run in the same column.

Up to 64 MB every byte is compared. Above that, size, start and end are compared; those duplicates sit in a list of their own at the bottom, because that is a strong suspicion and not a fact.

Editing

Tab Edit in the right panel: crop, straighten, rotate, exposure and contrast.

• Rotating costs no quality and happens straight away.
• On saving you choose: overwrite — the original then goes to the recycle bin — or Save as new, which leaves the original in place.
• To undo an edit, use the ↶ button in the right panel. There is no Ctrl + Z.
• Editing does not work on RAW files. There the tab stays empty, with one line saying why — a tab that is there and can do nothing is worse than a tab that is not there.

On videos you set chapters: a marker at a moment with a title beside it. Click it and the video starts there. Chapters and names sit beside the video, not inside it — adding one marker would otherwise mean rewriting a file of gigabytes. If you do want them in the file, to give the film away for instance, that is a separate action you choose yourself.

Map and location

Tab Location: where the photo was taken, with the place name beside it. The pin puts its point on the spot itself, with the head above it — a dot on the spot disappears among the roads and blocks. If a photo has no location, point at it on the map or look up a place name. Geotagging can also be done in bulk on a selection.

Below that sit two tick boxes. They do different things with the same map, and only one can be on at a time: a density map under a circle can no longer be read.

All photos on the map puts your whole collection on it, not as separate pins but as density blooms. The colour says how busy it is — blue for a single photo, then green, orange and red where there are many — and the blooms are translucent, so neighbours run into one another and form one area instead of a grid of blocks. A single photo therefore does not cover the map beneath it; three weeks of holiday does light up. One glance shows where you have been.

Area on the map lays a circle over it, and everything inside comes into the grid. Tick the box and the circle is there at once: around the photo you have open if it has a location, otherwise in the middle of the map. It starts at a quarter of what you can see — a fixed number of kilometres would be a dot when zoomed out and off-screen when zoomed in.

• Dragging at the edge changes the radius, the centre stays. Grabbing the middle shifts the whole circle, the radius stays. Two actions with one consequence each.
• The photo count runs along while you drag. The circle is the answer to "how many", and you should see that while you make it.
• Right-click the map: choose an area here, and if one is already there, move or remove it. There is only ever one — two circles would raise the question of which of them counts.
• Smaller than a hundred metres is not possible: that is finer than a camera's GPS. Larger than five hundred kilometres is not either, because then "nearby" is no longer a neighbourhood.
• Unticking the box removes the circle and the filter with it. A filter without a visible circle is a view where you can no longer see why it is so short.

The wheel zooms, and whatever sits under your mouse stays there. The map draws only the tiles in view, and drawing never waits for them to be fetched — so you keep dragging while the tiles arrive.

Keyboard

RAW files

RAW takes part fully. Your .nef, .cr2, .arw, .raf or .dng sits in the grid with a thumbnail, is searchable by image, counts towards faces, and takes names, tags and captions like any other photo. Years of shooting with an SLR does not leave you archiving half a collection.

That works without hanging a RAW developer off the app: every RAW file carries a full JPEG of the shot inside it — the camera made that anyway for the screen on the back. Fotusa uses it.

If you shoot RAW + JPEG together, there are two files of the same shot. By default you see both: Fotusa hides nothing by itself. In the settings you choose whether to see both, only the JPEG, or only the RAW. They are a pair only when name and folder both match.

Limits

• No cloud, no upload, no account.
• No external AI — all recognition runs on this computer.
• No video editing, and image search skips videos.
• No undo for a move inside the app: Explorer and the recycle bin are there for that.

Nothing from your collection leaves this pc. The only exception is looking up a place name on the map.

Coming from another program

Everything that sits in your photos themselves — tags, captions, stars, date, location, and names written as XMP — is simply picked up while reading in. You do not have to do anything for that.