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 your Pictures folder, if there is one, is added automatically (the ✕ beside it removes it; no photos are deleted). For other folders, or if nothing was added, use “Add a folder” at the bottom of the left pane: choose a folder with “Browse…”, or type its full path and press “Add” (the box shows an example). Clicking a drive under “Drives” on the left does not add it; it opens an import from that drive.

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. While a scan is running (a folder added or removed, Rescan, the import destination, a drive coming back) or new photos that have no thumbnail yet are still being read, the header shows “Updating” or “n left” next to the count (hover over it for the full text). Work that ends quickly and the sync at startup are not shown, nor is anything while the import screen is open.

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, and the view moves to the progress when the import starts. When a copy finishes, sizes are compared to verify it.

When exactly one camera card (a removable drive with DCIM) is inserted, the import opens with it already selected. On Windows the same goes for a single removable drive when there is no card. Cards and removable drives stand out in the list on the left.

An import that arrives from AutoPlay while Settings is open waits until Settings closes. Settings says “An import is waiting”; press “Close and import” to open it.

Offer pictkura when a card is inserted (Windows only)

When you insert a USB drive or an SD card, “pictkura で写真を取り込む” (import photos with pictkura) appears among the Windows AutoPlay choices. It never starts on its own: the import wizard opens on that drive only when you choose it. The entry itself is worded in Japanese, except with the English MSI, where it reads “Import photos with pictkura”.

The entry is registered by the installer (MSI or setup) and by the Microsoft Store version, and uninstalling removes it. The app itself registers no entry (it removes the one an older version registered from the app; if pictkura was your AutoPlay default, the installer versions move that choice to the new entry, and the portable build clears it). The portable build does not offer it. Change what happens by default with “Open Windows AutoPlay settings” under “When you insert a USB drive or SD card” in Settings ⚙ (see also “When inserting a card asks you nothing” below).

Versions up to 0.3 registered the entry from the app at startup. Installing a new version clears that old entry (right after the installer runs; on a shared PC, for each other person when they first start the new version). If you had the entry with the portable build, start the new version once, or run pictkura.exe --unregister-autoplay when you stop using it. When moving from the installer version to the Microsoft Store version, uninstall the installer version first — the Store version cannot remove the old entry, so two entries with the same name would appear.

When inserting a card asks you nothing

If your Windows account 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 choice, but nothing ever puts the question to you.

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 (with the English MSI it reads “Import photos with pictkura”), 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. Any text outside the braces is kept as you wrote it: photos-{year}/{month}-{day}, for instance, gives photos-2026/08-13/.

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 capture time read on an earlier pass comes third, after EXIF and the OS, ahead of the file name. A date that was only the modification time, used because nothing else could be read, does not count. A file whose image size cannot be read is checked again on every startup, and this keeps a pass that reads nothing from erasing a capture time read before.

4. Find

Use the search box at the top, or the command palette with Ctrl + K (⌘ + K on macOS).

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

Besides jumping to a date, narrowing by camera and searching, the command palette offers actions (“Import from USB”, “Rescan”, “Show favorites only”, “Show picked only”, “Show keyboard shortcuts”, “Show all photos”, “Calendar view”, “Photo grid”). When what you type matches the start of an action’s name (the start of a word), that action is listed above the search. Actions also answer to their English names whatever language the app is in.

When a filter leaves no photos at all, the heading names the filters in effect (“No photos match these filters: …”). “Clear search” clears the search, and “Show all photos” clears every filter at once. If photos are still being imported or indexed, it says more may turn up. If the sync that runs at startup did not finish, it asks you to press Rescan.

5. Look

Click a tile to open the full-size viewer.

Right-click for “Open”, “Open with another app…”, “Show in folder”, “Show more options” (Windows), “Copy image to clipboard”, “Rotate right”, “Rotate left”, “Print…”, “Add to favorites”, “Pick”, “Info” and “Delete (move to trash)”. “Info” shows the name, folder, size, date taken and more (both files of a RAW+JPEG pair). When you select photos in the grid, a line under the selection bar shows the name and size, or the total for several. With Outgoing on, “Add to Outgoing” is there too; while Outgoing on the left is shown, “Remove from Outgoing” takes its place (9. Outgoing). An editing app you pick once is remembered and appears in the menu from then on.

Right-click a JPEG in the grid or the viewer and choose “Rotate right” or “Rotate left” to turn it. Only the orientation information in the file (EXIF) is rewritten, so the image quality does not change. Other apps show the photo turned too. Rotating gives the file a new modification time. A photo you rotated in pictkura gets “Restore original orientation”, which puts back the orientation and the modification time it had before. Turning a photo back to where it started also puts the original modification time back. In a RAW+JPEG pair only the JPEG turns. Photos on a camera card and photos that are only in the cloud can’t be rotated, and neither can a JPEG with no orientation information, such as a screenshot. When a photo can’t be rotated for another reason, a message says why. Importing a card again after you rotated one of its photos does not bring that photo in twice.

Choose “Print…” from the right-click menu to print that photo on a page of its own. Pick how it goes on the paper: “Fit to page”, “Crop to fill” or “Stretch to fill (ignore proportions)”, then go on to the system print dialog. pictkura remembers your choice. When the photo and the paper face different ways, the photo is turned to match. The image sent to the printer has its shooting details, such as the location, removed, so saving to PDF does not carry the location along. For a borderless print, choose a borderless paper size in the print dialog.

To print several photos, select them and choose “Print…” in the selection bar. You can put 1, 2, 4, 6 or 9 photos on a page, and add each file’s name and date taken underneath (an index print). The same three ways of placing a photo apply, and photos that do not fit continue on the next page. They are printed in grid order (newest first) and are not turned. Videos are not printed. For a RAW+JPEG pair, the side chosen for viewing photos large is printed. There is a limit to how many photos can be printed at once (28 at one per page, up to 130 at nine per page).

On Windows, “Show more options” opens the same menu as File Explorer, with “Send to”, “Open with”, “Properties” and the rest. If you move a photo elsewhere from that menu, its favorite and pick marks are dropped.

Opening a photo by clicking its tile grows it out of the tile. Closing shrinks the current photo back into its tile (scrolling the grid there if the tile is off screen). There is no motion when you open from the calendar, for videos, or when the transition is set to None.

When you step to the previous or next photo, it slides in from the side you stepped toward. Holding a key down to step does not animate. Settings → “When you view a photo full screen” switches this to None or Fade. The slideshow transition is chosen separately and fades by default. If your system is set to reduce motion, photos change without moving whatever you choose.

Take out the picture you are looking at

📋 at the top right copies it to the clipboard, 💾 saves it to a file; the keys are Ctrl + C and Ctrl + S (⌘ on macOS). What comes out is the picture that is on screen, exactly as you see it.

From a RAW you get the display JPEG the camera embedded, as it is. Nothing is developed — that embedded picture is also what the viewer shows you. For a photo the app can display directly (JPEG, PNG and so on) the original file is copied: nothing is re-encoded, so the shooting information (Exif) and the colour profile (ICC) survive.

Saving starts in the folder you saved to last time (your Pictures folder the first time).

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 ★ or ⚑ for the whole selection, copy or move it to a folder you pick, print it, or move all of it to the Recycle Bin in one go. It asks before deleting. Deleting, moving and copying run one at a time; pressing again while one is running tells you to wait for it to finish. With Outgoing on, the bar also has “Add to Outgoing” (“Remove from Outgoing” while Outgoing on the left is shown).

⚑ Picked

The ⚑ that P puts on a photo is a separate shelf from ★ favorites. ★ 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 favorites 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 (★ favorites 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 caption counts the photos you picked out. To choose one frame out of a burst, select the burst, come in here, and work through 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 colors are the camera’s own rendering.

Full size means the preview's longest edge reaches 1600px, where a full-screen view stops looking soft. None means only a frame appears; the file still sorts by date and still answers the camera filter, because the size and the EXIF are read separately from the picture.

Measured on 2026-09-04 against 1,870 real files (every CC0 sample at raw.pixls.us), with no crashes. ori and arq joined the scan list in 0.2.7, after this sweep had run — their 20 files are counted in the table above. 923 bodies from 56 makers are listed here — look up your own, with the file we measured linked from each row.

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 comes from the OS, not from pictkura. 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, but not guaranteed. 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, even though it sits 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.

Video volume and mute are remembered, so the next video starts the same way. While muted (volume 0 included), the viewer shows a speaker icon with a cross; click it to turn the sound on.

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
• Copying or moving to a folder, copying to the clipboard and printing fetch the real file. Rotating is not available
• 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. Outgoing

Outgoing lines up, at every import, what you want to hand to a photo service in an Outgoing folder. Today it is for Google Photos. Folder backup in Google Photos uploads the folder you add as a whole, with no setting to leave out RAW files or videos, so pictkura places only what should go up in the Outgoing folder. pictkura does not talk to Google; the uploading is done by Google Photos.

How it works and how to start, with diagrams, are on the Outgoing page. This section gives the detailed rules.

Getting started

1. In Settings → Outgoing, turn on “Also place imported photos in the Outgoing folder”. The folder is created and its place is shown
2. If you use Google Photos: in Google Photos (photos.google.com), add that folder with “+” → folder backup

What goes in

• Every import lines up the photos it copied (except those matching the library’s exclude patterns), in the same folder layout as inside the library location
• For RAW+JPEG pairs, only the JPEG. For RAW-only shots, Settings offers “Leave out” or “Place the embedded JPEG” (the preview picture the camera stored inside the RAW, given the capture date). A RAW without a preview of at least 1000 px on the long edge (some older cameras, and some phones’ DNG files) is not placed
• Videos follow “Place videos too”. Photos inside OneDrive go in only when that setting is on
• With “Stack bursts into one tile” on, a burst within one import is placed as its first frame only. A frame you flag ⚑ later is added only when a frame of the same burst is already in Outgoing (not when you flag the whole burst at once; removing ⚑ does not take it out of Outgoing)
• When a real JPEG with the same name is imported later for a RAW-only shot, it replaces the JPEG taken out of the RAW
• Photos are placed as hard links (a second name for the same file), so they take no extra disk space. An embedded JPEG is a separate file and does take space

Sending photos you imported earlier

These appear only while Outgoing is turned on in Settings.

• Select them in the grid and use “Add to Outgoing” on the selection bar. “Add to Outgoing” in a photo’s right-click menu sends only that photo. With bursts stacked, the selection bar and the calendar place every frame of a burst, and the right-click menu places only its cover frame
• Right-click a month heading in the calendar for “Add this month to Outgoing” or “Add all of <year> to Outgoing”. It covers the photos the current search and filter show
• Over 100 photos, after select-all or a range, from the calendar, and when a new folder has to be made, pictkura shows what will be placed before placing anything
• What you choose goes in even if it is a video or a RAW-only shot (as its embedded JPEG, when one of at least 1000 px on the long edge can be taken out); those two settings only steer what an import places on its own. Photos inside OneDrive follow their setting
• Files that exist only in the cloud are not placed. Download them first, then send again

Seeing and removing what was placed

“Outgoing” on the left appears while Outgoing is turned on in Settings, and while anything placed is still there.

• Click it to list only what is in the Outgoing folder, with a count. While Outgoing is on, a note above the list says which folder to choose in your photo service, with “Open folder” and “Copy path”
• Select photos there and use “Remove from Outgoing” on the selection bar. “Remove from Outgoing” in a photo’s right-click menu removes only that photo. pictkura does not ask first; it tells you how many were removed
• Only what is in the Outgoing folder is removed. The originals on your computer stay. If you use Google Photos: it stays in Google Photos
• Anything that could not be removed right now (the drive may be disconnected) also leaves the list, and pictkura tries again the next time it starts

One Outgoing folder per drive

Hard links cannot cross drives, so each drive that holds photos gets its own Outgoing folder (pictkura-outgoing under your home folder if the drive holds it, otherwise at the top of the drive). When one is created, the confirmation or the import result usually tells you (not when it is made by the retry at startup). The current Outgoing folder is shown under “Folder” in Settings → Outgoing; when photos have been placed in other Outgoing folders too, every folder used so far is listed below it. Each one has “Open folder” and “Copy path”. If you use Google Photos: add each one you use in Google Photos. You can choose another place on the same drive as the import destination with Settings → Outgoing → Change. This changes only where new photos are placed: what is already in the previous Outgoing folder stays there (and stays in the list in Settings). Keep the previous folder added to your photo service until everything in it has been uploaded.

It cannot be placed:

• on an exFAT or FAT drive (they cannot make hard links; many external USB drives use them)
• for a library location that is a whole drive, such as an SD card
• while the import destination is a whole drive (change the import destination)
• while your home folder itself, or a folder containing it, is a library location (the default place falls inside the library; if the import destination is on the same drive, choose a place in Settings; otherwise photos on that drive cannot be sent)
• inside a sync folder (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and Desktop and Documents on a Mac). pictkura only recognises their default places; avoid a sync folder you put somewhere else yourself
• while no import destination is set or it cannot be reached (Outgoing cannot be turned on)
• when the Outgoing folder is a symbolic link or junction

When something is deleted

• Moving a photo to the Recycle Bin in pictkura also takes it out of the Outgoing folder. If you use Google Photos: it stays in Google Photos
• If an original is deleted outside pictkura, what is left in the Outgoing folder goes to the Recycle Bin. While the original is still in the Recycle Bin it stays; after the Recycle Bin is emptied, it moves the next time pictkura scans (at startup, an import, a rescan, or when it notices a folder change)
• An embedded JPEG goes to the Recycle Bin at the next scan after its RAW is moved to the Recycle Bin, renamed or moved elsewhere outside pictkura (it is not the same file as the RAW, so these cannot be told apart)
• Photos moved with pictkura’s “Move to folder” are no longer followed: what was placed stays, and trashing them later does not take it out of the Outgoing folder
• Photos renamed or moved within the same drive outside pictkura keep what was placed. If such a photo is deleted later, what was placed goes to the Recycle Bin the next time pictkura scans after the Recycle Bin is emptied. Moving one to another drive counts as deleting it
• Deleting things inside the Outgoing folder yourself does not touch the originals

Google Photos is a trademark of Google LLC.

10. 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 → “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.

The Microsoft Store version is updated by the Store. pictkura itself does not check for new versions there, so this notice and its settings do not appear.

11. Limitations and things it does not do

12. Where settings and data live

The Microsoft Store version uses the same places if another build of pictkura was used with this Windows account (settings and the index carry on as they are). If only the Store version is used, they live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\<package name>\LocalCache\Roaming\dev.harusame.pictkura\, and uninstalling the Store version deletes that folder.

About the log. It records the things that did not work — a read that fell over part-way (a corrupt file, say), a sidecar that could not be moved to the recycle bin, a launch that failed — and what it did in the Outgoing folders (creating one, removing from it, placing what could not be placed earlier), and what it put right on its own (a file left half-rotated, AutoPlay entries an older version registered, a window that ended up off screen or did not fit the display), one line each. Other successes are not written. The failures written are the machine falling over: an index it cannot read or write, a setting it cannot save. That includes ones you were told about on screen, so you can report them afterwards. What does not get written is a choice you can simply make again — a folder that is not there, a library another app manages — or something the screen already shows you, like a thumbnail that does not appear. So no file means none of the failures that belong here have happened (if you use Outgoing, or pictkura put something right on its own, the file can exist without any failure). Open it from Settings → “About” → “Open the log” (the button is disabled while there is nothing to open). The sentences this app writes there are English whatever language the app is set to, so they can go straight into a bug report; what you see on screen stays in your own language. Reasons handed back by Windows or macOS stay in that system's language, because they are not ours to translate. It stays on this machine and is never sent anywhere. Lines can contain file names and folder paths, so read it before pasting it into a bug report. Deleting it is fine; it is created again if it is needed. It has a size cap, and when it is passed the previous record is kept as pictkura.log.1 — unless it cannot be moved aside (another program holding the file open, say), in which case the older half is dropped to keep the cap, and the log says so.

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. Setting Outgoing’s [google_mirror] exclude_raw = false places every RAW as it is (paired RAWs and RAW-only shots alike; the “RAW-only shots” setting then has no effect). Your photos are never stored in these places. Deleting the database does not delete any photo; it is rebuilt, though ★, ⚑, the records that let a rotation be undone and the record of what was placed in Outgoing or is waiting to be placed again are lost.