Preview Tab¶
Summary
Preview is the photo's "do I keep this?" pane. It flags, labels, and rates the shot, shows the image with camera and location facts, and lists every edit you have staged but not saved.
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Triage in one row
Pick or reject, color label, and a five-star rating. None of it writes to the file.
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Identity at a glance
The photo, plus cards for exposure, camera, date, and location. Cards only appear when the file has the data to fill them.
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Pending edits
A "Pending Save" card lists exactly what the next commit will write, grouped by category, so you never have to guess.
Triage row¶
The bar at the top of the tab handles three actions: flag, color label, and star rating. Flag the photo with one of four states (Pick P, Maybe M, Reject X, Unflag U). Tap a swatch for a color label (6 through 9 for red, yellow, green, blue). Tap a star (1 through 5) for a rating.
These values stay in Jade GT only. Jade GT never writes them into the photo's EXIF (the camera-written data inside every JPEG). The × at the end of the star strip clears the rating.
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Pick
Green flag. Photos you plan to deliver. Filter for picks only from the library filter chip strip.
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Maybe
Amber ?. The photographer's "I don't know yet" bucket. Keeps uncertain frames out of the final commit decision so they get a second pass without polluting Picks or Rejects.
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Reject
Red X. Photos you do not plan to deliver. Filter for rejects only to confirm in batch before commit.
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Unflagged
No flag yet. Default state on import.
Candidate-reject hint inside a stack
When you reject a single frame inside an expanded stack, the other frames pick up a soft red dotted ring (a candidate-reject hint). It is not a rejection. It is Jade saying "you probably want to look at the rest of this burst." Press X to confirm or U to clear the hint. The hint also clears on its own when you Pick or Maybe the original rejected frame.
What happens with a batch selection
Select two or more photos and the row applies your choice to every selected photo. If the photos disagree on a value (some are picks, some are rejects), the matching cell shows a small Mixed badge instead of the usual highlight.
Prev/next navigation¶
A pair of arrow buttons flanks an "X of Y" counter directly above the image. They walk the photo list one at a time, the same as the Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right keyboard shortcuts.
Both buttons honor any filter you have set in the library. If you narrow the gallery to four-star photos only, prev/next walks that subset, not the full library.
Out of view
If you set a filter after selecting a photo and that photo no longer passes the filter, the counter reads "out of view." Both buttons stay enabled so you can step away to a visible photo.
Spacebar = Quick Look
Press Space from anywhere outside a text field to open Quick Look on the active photo. The window goes black and the photo fills the screen at its full aspect. Left and Right walk to the previous and next photo without closing the overlay. Press Space or Esc to close. Quick Look uses the same filter as prev/next, so a "picks only" cull through 200 frames is just Space, arrow, arrow.
Compare and Survey¶
Pick the sharpest frame from a burst, or choose between two near-identical ceremony moments, without flipping back and forth through one photo at a time. Compare / Survey puts up to four photos side by side and keeps them in lockstep when you zoom in or pan around.
Select 2 to 4 photos, then press C. The Command Palette has the same entry under Compare 2 photos or Survey N photos.
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Two photos
Open side by side at maximum size. Best for picking the better of two near-duplicates.
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Three or four photos
Open in a 2 by 2 grid. Best for narrowing a burst down to one.
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Move them together
Drag inside any tile and every tile pans. Scroll the wheel and every tile zooms to where your cursor sits. Use it to check the same eye, same focus point, on every frame.
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The active tile
Click a tile, or press 1 to 4, to make it active. A green ring marks it. When you close the overlay, the active photo is the one that stays selected.
Inside the overlay:
| Keys | What happens |
|---|---|
| C or Esc | Close |
| 1 to 4 | Make tile 1, 2, 3, or 4 active |
| P | Pick the active tile, reject the rest, close |
| M | Mark the active tile as Maybe, stay open |
| X | Reject every tile, close |
| U | Clear the flag on every tile, stay open |
| Arrow keys | Pan every tile a little |
| + or - | Zoom every tile in or out |
| 0 or \ | Reset the view |
| Drag a tile | Pan every tile |
| Scroll a tile | Zoom every tile to the cursor |
Why every tile moves together
Burst frames share the same framing, so your eye lands in the same spot on each one. Locking the tiles in step means zooming to "the front eye" picks the same pixel in every photo. If the framings differ, drag the part you care about into view first.
Cull a burst in four keystrokes
The fastest path through a burst: open Compare on the cluster, press a number key to put the keeper in the active tile, press P. The keeper is flagged, the others are rejected, the overlay closes, and you are back in the gallery ready for the next group. Press U if you tagged the wrong tile and want to re-decide without losing the comparison.
Even faster: stack the burst first
Jade GT auto-builds photo stacks on import. Pressing P on a collapsed stack keeper picks every frame in the burst at once, no Compare required. Use Compare when you want to see the frames side by side before deciding.
Even more focused: open Cull Mode
For a long cull, open Cull Mode from the Command Palette (Cmd+K). The active photo fills the screen, the top bar shows live progress, and every Pick / Maybe / Reject auto-advances to the next frame.
Let the badges route your attention
Jade GT scores every photo on three signals (Soft, Bright / Dark, Burst 8+) and shows them as small badges on the thumbnail. None of them auto-reject. Filter the gallery to Auto: Soft from the library-filter bar to jump straight to the softest frames in the longest bursts. See Cull Mode auto-flag badges.
Find near-duplicates without AI¶
Burst shots, slight camera shifts, and "did I get the eyes" retries fill up a shoot fast. Jade GT can group those photos for you so the job becomes picking the keeper instead of scanning the strip.
Two commands in the palette (Cmd+K or Ctrl+K):
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| Select photos that look like this one | With one photo selected, finds every other photo that looks like it and adds them to the selection. Now C opens Compare on the group. |
| Group near-duplicate photos | Scans the whole shoot, groups every burst, and selects every photo that belongs to a group. A toast tells you how many groups were found. |
After the selection lands, pick a winner with the usual triage keys (P for pick, X for reject, the number keys for star rating), then run the Library filter to hide the rejects.
How the matching works
Jade GT builds a small fingerprint for each photo: an unchanging number based on the light-and-dark pattern in the image. Two photos with similar fingerprints likely match. The math runs in your browser, with no model and no cloud. The method is a public-domain image fingerprint, not AI.
First run is slower
Jade GT builds the fingerprints the first time you run either command. A shoot of a thousand photos takes a few seconds. Later runs are nearly instant because Jade GT saves each fingerprint with the rest of the photo's catalog info.
Image and metadata cards¶
Under the triage row, the Preview tab shows the photo at gallery resolution. Beneath it, up to five small cards show the facts you need to identify the shot.
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Image footer
Pixel dimensions, megapixels, format (JPG, PNG, RAW, and so on), and file size. Always present.
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Exposure
Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length. Comes straight from EXIF.
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Camera
Body make and model, plus the lens model when the file carries it.
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Date Taken
The timestamp from EXIF
DateTimeOriginal, shown in your browser's time zone. -
Location
The place name Jade GT looks up from the GPS coordinates (city, region, country) when GPS is set. Raw latitude and longitude sit just below.
Cards only appear when the photo has the data. A phone shot with no GPS skips the Location card. A scan with no EXIF skips Exposure, Camera, and Date Taken.
Readiness, staged badges, and Re-read¶
A short row of chips sits below the metadata cards. It answers three questions at once: how ready is this photo for stock, what edits am I about to save, and how do I refresh from disk?
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Readiness pill
The photo's stock-readiness score. Click it to jump to the Stock Readiness dashboard. Locked while a Privacy Scrub is staged.
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Staged-change chips
One chip per category (Tags, GPS, Compress, Rename, Date, Scrub) with a count of the pending edits. Click any chip to jump to the tab that owns it.
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Re-read
Re-reads EXIF and IPTC from the file on disk and drops any pending Tags edits. Use this after Lightroom or another editor has touched the file while Jade GT was open. Jade GT asks for confirmation before running, because re-read cannot be undone.
Pending Save card¶
When any edit is staged for the selected photo, a Pending Save card appears at the bottom of the tab. The card lists exactly what the next commit will write, grouped by category.
This is the same per-photo summary the Review Hub shows. It lives here so you don't have to open the Commit dialog just to see what you have queued up.
Scrub takes priority
If a Privacy Scrub is staged, the card shows a single row reading All metadata → SCRUB. The scrub overwrites every other edit on commit, so the card hides the rest.
Batch preview view¶
Select two or more photos and the Preview tab switches to a summary view of the entire selection.
The batch view answers "what's in this selection?" without making you click through each photo. A thumbnail strip shows the first 12, with a +N chip at the end when the selection is larger.
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Selection summary
Total photo count, combined file size, and a format breakdown (for example,
JPEG 4). -
Thumbnail strip
The first 12 photos as small chips. A +N more chip sits at the end when the selection is larger than 12.
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Cameras
The top three camera bodies by count, so you can spot a mixed shoot at a glance.
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Date Range
The earliest and latest capture times in the selection. Useful for sanity-checking the shoot before a GPX match.
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GPS Coverage
How many photos in the selection already carry GPS, with a percent (for example, "1 of 4 (25%)"). A quick check on how much work the Location tab still has to do.
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Staged chips, totaled
The same per-category chips as the single view, but each chip shows the count across the entire selection.
The batch triage row applies whatever you set across every selected photo, with a Mixed badge in any cell where the photos currently disagree.
Troubleshooting¶
The Location card is missing
Preview only shows the Location card when the photo has GPS in EXIF. Jump to the Location tab to drop a pin, run a GPX match, or paste in coordinates.
The prev/next buttons walk a tiny subset
A library filter is active. Clear it from the library toolbar or set it to "All Photos" to walk the full import.
Re-read greyed out the Pending Save card
Re-read drops any staged Tags edits. That is the trade-off you confirmed when running it. Other categories (GPS, Compress, Rename, Date, Scrub) survive a re-read, because re-read only refreshes EXIF and the IPTC block (the captions-and-credits metadata stock agencies read). Those other edits live elsewhere.
Readiness pill won't click
A Privacy Scrub is staged on this photo. The pill is locked while a scrub is queued because the Tags tab is also locked. Cancel the scrub from the EXIF Info tab's Danger Zone to unlock both.
Related guides¶
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Where the staged Tags chip points. Keywords, captions, rights, and the Stock Readiness dashboard live here.
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Where the staged GPS chip points. Drop a pin, run a GPX match, or paste in coordinates.
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Where the staged Date or Scrub chip points. Shift times, browse every field, or run a Privacy Scrub.
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The final pane that turns every chip on this page into bytes on disk.