Keyboard shortcuts
Everything without the mouse.
Grouped by where they fire. On Windows and Linux, swap ⌘ for Ctrl.
Global
Work anywhere in the app.
View navigation
Jump to a top-level page. ⌥ avoids colliding with the rating (⌘ plus number) and color (bare number) shortcuts.
Browse · ratings, color labels, protect
Applied to the current selection. Bare numbers set the COLOR label, in Photo Mechanic’s Color Class order, and ⌘ plus a number sets the star rating — the same keys work in the grid, the preview, and the cull view. Stars, labels, and the protect tag sync to XMP, so Photo Mechanic and Lightroom see the same values, and theirs show up here. Protect guards frames from deletion, not from captioning: tagging or editing metadata on a locked photo clears the file lock and writes, Photo Mechanic-style, and locked frames ingest from a card cleanly with the protect tag carried into the copy.
Browse · filter bar
Filter chips show only matching photos on a plain click (click the active chip again to clear) and select the matching photos on ⌥-click. Add ⌘ or ⇧ to the ⌥ to grow the selection. The All / Selected toggle narrows the grid to the current selection. Protected means marked in-camera or tagged in Photo Mechanic.
Browse · selection and navigation
Work the grid and the tabs. Arrow keys move a cursor through the contact sheet and scroll it into view as you go, and closing any full-screen view leaves the grid sitting on the photo you were last looking at.
Preview modal
When the full-screen photo viewer is open it owns its own keys, and Browse shortcuts stop firing. The zoom slider in the footer works the same way as the cull view’s — quarter steps of the fitted photo — on the tagging and Edit views. The crop surface stays fitted, so the crop rectangle keeps lining up with what actually gets delivered. Closing leaves the grid sitting on the photo you were looking at, however far you paged.
Full-screen cull view
Press F in Browse for a distraction-free flagging pass: the photo at maximum size under one banner with the stars and color labels, all clickable. Two banner toggles decide whether setting a star or setting a color auto-advances to the next photo (clearing never advances), and both are remembered. A zoom slider sits where the filename used to be — the name now reads along the bottom with the dimensions and file size. Zoom runs in quarter steps of the fitted photo, so the first press enlarges by 25% rather than jumping straight to full pixels, and you drag to pan, which is the focus check. The slider’s left end is Fit, so dragging it back is the reset. The zoom level carries to the next photo, letting you check a whole run at one magnification, while the pan re-centers. Closing leaves the grid sitting on the photo you were looking at.
MatchID review
Inside the review screen. ⌘N and ⌘B work even while the caret is in a caption field — edits save first, and the caret lands in the same field on the new photo.
Modals and editors
Metadata fields
Type the delimiter (set in Settings ▸ Browse, default \) around a code to expand it from the bound roster.