pictkura Manual

Import your photos, lay them out, find them, look at them. That is all this app does.

1. Getting started — register a library

On first launch, use “Add a folder” at the bottom of the left pane: type the folder that holds your photos and press “Add”. You can also pick one from the list of drives.

Scanning starts immediately, and a grid ordered by date builds up. The grid stays live while the scan runs — rows appear as they are ready.

2. Import from a USB drive or SD card

Press “Import from USB” at the top.

While copying you get a progress bar, an estimated time remaining, and the photo currently being copied. When a copy finishes, sizes are compared to verify it.

Offer pictkura when a card is inserted (Windows only)

pictkura adds itself to the Windows AutoPlay choices that appear when you insert a USB drive or an SD card. This is on by default, but it never starts on its own — the import wizard opens on that drive only when you choose it. Note that the entry itself is worded in Japanese.

To turn it off, clear the “When you insert a USB drive or SD card” checkbox in Settings ⚙. It disappears from the choices right away. That is also the reliable way to remove it before uninstalling. Uninstalling with the installer removes it automatically, but only for the user who ran the uninstall (the setting is per user). The portable build is just a folder you delete, so run pictkura.exe --unregister-autoplay before deleting it.

When inserting a card asks you nothing

If this PC already has a default action, inserting a card shows no choices at all. Windows performs whatever was decided (for example “Open folder to view files”) without asking. pictkura is registered as a candidate, but nothing ever asks.

Check and change it under Settings → Bluetooth & devices → AutoPlay. “Choose AutoPlay defaults” lists “Removable drive” and “Memory card”. Pick “Ask me every time” if you want to choose on every insert, or pictkura’s own entry if you always want pictkura. That entry reads 「pictkura で写真を取り込む」 — it is worded in Japanese whatever your Windows language is, so look for the pictkura icon and the name in brackets. If that list shows it at all, the registration is working.

If you would rather see the choices once without changing the default, right-click the drive in File Explorer and choose “Open AutoPlay”: the picker that should have appeared on insert opens on the spot. In the Windows 11 right-click menu it lives under “Show more options” (or Shift+F10).

Files that sit next to a photo travel with it

A .xmp written by a raw developer (develop settings, ratings, keywords) sits next to the photo under the same name. pictkura carries those along: leaving one behind looks, later on, exactly like losing all your edits. This applies when importing, when copying or moving to a folder, and when sending a photo to the recycle bin.

Anything else — video thumbnails (.thm), low-resolution proxies (.lrv), PlayMemories Home bookkeeping (.modd, .moff), voice memos (.wav) — is not carried by default, because the camera can regenerate it or it belongs to another application. You can add what you need to the settings file (see “Where settings and data live”), or empty the list to carry nothing at all.

Write it under [import] in pictkura.toml. When the line is absent the five defaults apply, so add it only if you want something different.

[import]
# also carry voice memos (.wav)
sidecar_extensions = ["xmp", "aae", "dop", "pp3", "on1", "wav"]

# carry nothing
# sidecar_extensions = []

3. Decide how imported photos are filed

⚙ (Settings) → “Import folder structure”. Where photos end up is hard to change later, so it is worth deciding first. There are nine common layouts to choose from.

As you type, the folder name you will actually get is shown right there. Writing {year}nen/{month}gatsu-{day}nichi, for instance, gives 2026nen/08gatsu-13nichi/.

If you keep the year folders yourself, point the destination at that year’s folder and choose 2026-08-16/ (no year level) or 08/2026-08-16/. Only date folders are then added underneath.

Where the date comes from

The date that picks the destination folder during an import comes from EXIF (the container, for videos), then from the file name, then from the other half of a RAW+JPG pair, then from the file's modification time — and if even that is unusable, from the day of the import itself. It never asks the OS or your library: at import time there is no library entry for the file yet.

The list below is how the date is decided once the photo is in your library, for the grid and the viewer. The first of these that exists is used.

1. EXIF capture time — written by the camera or phone
2. What the OS already knows — available even when the file only exists in the cloud
3. A date in the file name — used when the name carries one, as in 2024-01-01 12.34.56.jpg
4. File modification time — when none of the above exist

Screenshots and images saved from social apps usually carry no EXIF, and modification time alone files them under “the day you saved it”. When the name carries a date, that wins, so they land on the right day.

When pictkura can make no picture for a file — a RAW with no usable preview, say — a date already recorded for it comes third in the list, ahead of the file name and the modification time, unless what is recorded is only that modification time, which means nothing has been read yet. That matters because a file that ends up with no size at all is looked at again on every startup, so a pass that reads nothing must not erase a date that was read before.

4. Find

Use the search box at the top, or the command palette with Ctrl + K.

All terms are ANDed. The order is fixed: newest capture date first.

5. Look

Click a tile to open the full-size viewer.

Right-click for “Open”, “Open with another app…”, “Show in folder” and “Delete (move to trash)”. An editing app you pick once is remembered and appears in the menu from then on.

6. Select several at once

Hover a tile and click the circle in its corner, or Ctrl + click it (⌘ on macOS), to start selecting. A bar appears at the top of the window with what you can do to the selection.

While something is selected, a plain click toggles a tile instead of opening the viewer. From the bar you can add or remove ★ for the whole selection, copy or move it to a folder you pick, or move all of it to the Recycle Bin in one go. It asks before deleting.

⚑ Picked

The ⚑ that P puts on a photo is a separate shelf from ★ favourites. ★ is “a photo I want to come back to”; ⚑ is “the one frame I keep out of this burst”. Sharing one mark would fill your favourites with the leftovers of every culling session. “⚑ Picked” in the sidebar lists what you picked, the search box takes ⚑ (or pick:), and the selection bar can pick or unpick a whole selection at once.

✕ Reject

Press X in the viewer and the photo becomes a rejection candidate. No file moves at that moment — the photo dims in the filmstrip below, and a “✕ 3” chip next to the caption counts them. Click the chip to look them over at any time, and press U if you change your mind.

When you close the viewer (Esc, a click outside the photo, or the ✕ at the top right) with candidates still marked, a confirmation screen opens. It shows every marked photo as a thumbnail: press “Keep” on the ones you want back, then “Move N to trash” to move the rest in one go. They go to the OS trash, so you can restore them later — restored files are picked up by the watcher and come back to the library (★ favourites and ⚑ picks have to be set again).

View the selection

“View the selection” in the bar opens the viewer on just those photos. ← → stay inside the selection, and the counter in the corner counts the photos you picked out. To choose one frame out of a burst, select the burst, come in here, and walk it with P and U.

Copy to folder / Move to folder

These put the selected files straight into the folder you pick, without date subfolders — handy for handing a few photos to someone, or filling a USB stick. A file that is already there — same name, size and timestamp — is left alone, so writing the same photos to the same folder again adds nothing; a different file that happens to share a name gets -1, -2 appended.

7. Supported file formats

Photos

RAW

No demosaicing. pictkura pulls out the display JPEG the camera wrote for its own rear screen. That takes a few milliseconds per file, and the colours are the camera’s own rendering.

Video

Appearing in the grid is the same on every platform. What changes is whether a picture comes with it: the ✅ in the grid column above is what was checked on Windows, and even there the picture is the OS's answer rather than ours. Grid thumbnails are borrowed from the OS, so a container is covered exactly as far as the OS can open it. On Windows that is the Shell, the same mechanism Explorer uses: .avi and HEVC .mov were measured coming back with a frame, .m2ts has never been checked, and anything the OS has no handler or codec for comes back empty. That HEVC measurement was taken on a machine with the paid extension described below installed; it was never tried without it. AVFoundation on macOS answers only for what it can open — mp4 and mov were measured returning a real frame, with H.264 and with HEVC (hvc1, the fourcc an iPhone writes), though those HEVC samples were re-encoded by macOS itself rather than written by a phone. .avi was measured returning nothing. Anything not named here is untested on both: a picture is possible, not promised. Linux has no route at all.

Duration, dimensions and capture time come from the container header for mp4, m4v, mov and 3gp — not a single byte of pixel data is read. Note that webm is not among them, despite sitting in the first row above. The other containers have nothing but the Windows Shell to fall back on — measured with a synthetic .m2ts, which came back with both duration and dimensions; the rest were never checked. On macOS and Linux those containers show no duration or dimensions, and the date falls back to the file name or the modification time.

8. Files that only exist in the cloud

On Windows, “Pictures” points at OneDrive by default, and after a while much of what is in it becomes “online-only”: the real file lives in the cloud and all you have locally is a marker.

• They do appear in the grid. Dimensions and capture time come from what the OS already knows, so they sit on the correct date
• The image may not appear. The real file is fetched only when you actually go and look at it
• Video duration is missing. It cannot be known without reading the container, and that needs the real file
• Videos are stopped before they open. Opening a multi-gigabyte video would download the entire file, so pictkura explains the situation and steers you to “Open in default app”

9. Update notices

A few seconds after it starts, pictkura asks once whether a newer version exists. If there is one, a quiet line naming the new version appears at the bottom of the window; pressing it opens the download page in your default browser. The app never replaces itself.

If you would rather it did not, turn off Settings → About pictkura → “Check for updates at startup”. With that off, pictkura never reaches the network at all — and you can still press “Check for updates” in the same place to ask once, right then.

10. Limitations and things it does not do

11. Where settings and data live

You can edit the settings file by hand. Anything the app has no UI for — the patterns of folders to exclude from scanning, or [import] sidecar_extensions for the files carried along with each photo — can be changed there. Your photos are never stored in these places. Deleting the database does not delete any photo; it is simply rebuilt.