Fotusa — manual

Where your work lives

This matters most, so it comes first: what do you lose if Fotusa ever disappears?

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. Fotusa keeps no copy of your photos.

Tags, captions, stars and date go into the photo itself. So does a location, once you choose Record in the photo. They travel to any other program that reads metadata.

What does not fit inside a photo — names on faces, albums, what you fetched from your devices — sits beside the photos, in a hidden folder (the name is Dutch: "backup of your work"):

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

Names are kept per folder, beside the photos they belong to; albums sit in the top folder of your photo folder. One folder of photos is therefore enough on its own to know who is in them. There is no central list being pointed at. Beside jouw werk in fotusa.json sits NIET WEGGOOIEN - hierin staat je werk in Fotusa.txt ("do not delete — your work in Fotusa is in here").

A name on a face only goes into the photo itself when you ask for it, with Write this name into the photo file — see the next chapter.

The computed data — thumbnails and search data — sits in the top folder of each photo folder, in a hidden folder of its own (the name is Dutch: "computed data, do not touch"):

.Fotusa - rekenwerk (niet aankomen)

Your licence, your settings and a daily copy of your work (seven days back, in dagkopieën) are in the backup folder as well. The search model, the map tiles and the log are in the computed-data folder. If you have several photo folders, these sit in the first one in the list. On your PC there is only the program, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Fotusa. If Fotusa cannot write to your photo folder, for instance a read-only network folder, the computed data for that folder goes on your PC, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Fotusa.

The daily copies are on the same drive as your photos, so a failed drive takes them with it. So choose a place on another drive, a stick or a network folder under menu → Settings and maintenance… → Maintenance tab → Backup elsewhere. A copy of your work then goes there by itself whenever you close the app or switch collections — not your photos. Restore… puts back the work of the whole collection.

What the app changes about your files

Anything that moves, copies or deletes a file asks first and says how many files. The app never deletes or moves anything on its own.

Writing a tag does not recompress your photo: only the metadata is changed, the image stays as it was.

Getting started

• Menu top right → Choose photo folders (PC)…: tick the folders Fotusa should include. The tree starts at your drives, so everything is reachable; a network path is added with Add network folder.
• 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; photos not yet processed appear as the scan goes on.
• Face finding and image search run after that, also in the background. The progress block at the bottom right shows how far along they are.

Hover over something for a short explanation. Every heading on the left, every button in the header, every tab on the right and every filter has such a tip, as do many other buttons. Once you know the app, turn the tips off with the Tips tick box in the header; ticking it brings them back.

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.

To read in your whole collection again, use menu → Rescan folders, the ⟳ button on the Folders heading, or Ctrl + R. For one folder, right-click it → Re-read this folder. Files that disappeared leave the computed data; new and changed ones are processed again.

Getting started tour

After the first start, once your folders are chosen, a small card Getting started appears. In five steps it points out the menu, the left side, the middle, the right side and the block at the bottom right; that part lights up.

It blocks nothing: drag it aside by the bar at the top and keep working. Next, Back, Done or ✕ — after that it does not come back by itself. To see it again: menu → Getting started.

Collections

You can keep your photos in several collections, for instance Private, Work, Family tree, or your father’s photos on an external drive. Each collection has its own photo folders, its own names and faces, its own albums and its own image search. Only one is open at a time, so nothing can mix.

• Top left, beside the logo, you see which collection is open: Fotusa - Private ▾. Click it for the list: a tick beside the open one, greyed out with (not connected) when its drive is not there. Choose another one and the app switches.
• At the bottom of that list, Manage collections… opens the Choose photo folders (PC)… window, with a tab per collection. + makes a new one. Per tab you choose the Name, the folders, and whether it is the Default.
• A folder belongs to one collection. A folder that already belongs to another collection is greyed out, with the name of that collection after it.
• One collection is the default. It holds the search model and the map tiles for all collections together. If it is not connected, image search and the map are unavailable for now.
• At startup the collection you last had open opens. If it is not there, the default opens.
• More collections need a licence. During the trial you work in one collection.

Moving a collection to another drive

• Copy the whole folder of the collection to the new drive, including the hidden folders .Fotusa - rekenwerk (niet aankomen) and .Fotusa - reservekopie van je werk. Turn on Hidden items in File Explorer to see them.
• Connect the new drive. Fotusa looks by itself and asks: “…” found at … — open it there? Choose Open. Your names, stars, albums and computed data are there at once; nothing is computed again and Fotusa moves or copies nothing.
• Fotusa does not ask (the copy is more than one folder below the drive)? Then in Choose photo folders, right-click the tab → Choose another location… and point to the folder.

The same photos on more computers

The same photo folder can be used on more than one computer: an external drive that travels with you, or a network folder. Your names and albums are kept per folder, the computed data once. Nothing is synchronised and there is no second copy anywhere.

• One computer at a time records anything. Whoever opens the collection first may write; the others look on. The bottom of the screen then says which computer has it open and since when, with a Take over button beside it.
• Looking on allows everything that does not write: browsing, searching, the map, the timeline, finding duplicates, a slideshow or a collage. Recording a name, star or caption, editing, moving or deleting is not possible; the footer then says why. The computer that writes does the computing.
• Sit still for five minutes and the collection is free for someone else. Your next click takes it back. While computing is still running, it stays yours.
• To make room deliberately, choose Stop working in this collection in the menu. Work in this collection again takes it back.
• Close the app properly and the collection is free straight away. If a computer goes down hard, the lock expires after an hour.

If you only work on your own drive, you will notice none of this: no lock file appears in your folders and there is no extra entry in the menu.

The three panels

The screen has the classic three-panel layout. Drag a divider to change a column’s width; Fotusa remembers it. Menu → Display: Small, Normal or Large makes everything bigger or smaller — text, buttons, panels.

Left is for collections, right is for the photo. The left panel is about collections — filters, people, albums, folders — and clicking filters the view. The right panel shows what you are looking at. With a photo chosen, it is about that single photo and a click there never jumps to another view: a name on a face is text, not a button, and all photos of that person are on the left. With no photo chosen, it gives an overview of what is in view — a folder, a search — and there you do filter: by a year in the timeline under Info, by a name under Faces.

Click a folder on the left and you see only that folder, with its subfolders — and those open up in the tree. Clicking the same folder again changes nothing. To see everything again, use All photos at the top left, or the cross behind the search bar (Let go of everything and start over). Right-clicking a folder offers Only this folder, Re-read this folder, Search this folder for faces again, Show in Explorer, Copy path and Copy name. Empty folders are left out of the tree by default; the button on the Folders heading brings them in.

Under All photos you scroll through your whole collection, grouped per folder, with a bar above every group carrying the path and the count; the top one stays put while you scroll. That bar also holds buttons for a slideshow ▶, a collage ▦ and the whole folder into an album ❐.

When you look at one folder, the bar above the grid says how many photos are in that folder and how many are in view. As long as nothing is filtered, All photos is marked; once you filter, the tree shows only the folders with hits, with the count behind them.

Background work — reading in, building thumbnails, finding faces, looking at photos for image search, copying — sits in a single block at the bottom right, above the footer. Collapsed, it shows the step running now, with a bar and a percentage; ▲ expands it to every step of this session, with how long each took. ▼ makes it small: then only a small box at the bottom shows how far the slowest work is; a click on the box brings the block back, and Fotusa remembers your choice.

A double click opens the photo in the lightbox, and that fills the middle panel — left and right stay in view. Above the photo sit the arrows, the number and the file name. The wheel zooms; once zoomed in you pan by dragging, with the middle mouse button or with the space bar held down. The caption is edited on the right, in the Info tab. F11 shows only the photo, on the whole screen: arrows browse, space starts a slideshow, Escape goes back.

Faces and people

The app only asks about people you have named yourself: "is this Anna?" — never "who is this?" about a stranger. That is what makes the job doable. A yes-or-no question about someone you know takes one click; a pile of thousands of nameless faces takes weeks.

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

This is how you then work through one person:

• Click a name under Faces on the left. The middle shows that person’s faces: first what is settled, then the suggestions.
• Below a suggestion are ✓ and ✕. In the bar above the faces, the same buttons answer all suggestions at once — with a question first, because there are sometimes hundreds.
• suggestions (12) shows only the open suggestions, ? only the confirmed faces that look little like the rest. ← All thumbnails takes you back.
• ⟳ searches again for this person’s faces and puts everything in order.
• Right-click a face: to another person, use as portrait, or remove.
• A person’s bar holds a slideshow, a face movie — every face of that person by date, aligned on the eyes — and a collage.

Browsing or filtering. A click on a name on the left is browsing: the middle goes to that person and nothing disappears. The name appears in the search line as a chip that is off; the next name takes its place. Click the chip and it is on: then you see only that person’s photos and faces.

Who is in view? With no photo chosen and the Faces tab open, the right shows who appears in what you are looking at — a folder, a search, a date or a circle on the map — and on how many photos. A click on a name there filters straight away, within what you are looking at.

Inner circle and Outer circle. The name list on the left has two parts: the Inner circle at the top, the Outer circle below. The Inner circle is for the people you see every day; keep it small and clear. Names you want to keep but do not meet every day — old classmates, a neighbour from years ago — go there with right-click on the name → Move to Outer circle. Move to Inner circle brings them back. With several names selected in the search bar it applies to all of them. Only the place in the list changes: photos, searching and the questions “is this …?” stay. Click a list’s header to fold it in or out.

Someone else? If the app asks “is this Yui?” and it is someone else, just type the right name and press Enter (or pick it from the list). That is two answers at once: the face gets that name, and Fotusa remembers ‘no, this is not Yui’ and will not ask it there again. Typing Yui yourself is simply yes. Escape removes what you typed; the question stays.

Two numbers behind a name, such as 11 (13): 11 faces with a frame — what the grid shows. In brackets: the person is in 13 photos in total, also without a face frame (Also in the photo). Hover over it for the same explanation.

Also in the photo. Someone who is in the picture without their face showing — from behind, half in frame — goes in the Also in the photo block. They take no part in recognition but do count when you search for that person. A face that should not take part in recognition, such as a profile, moves there with Don’t recognise — move to Also in the photo; the name stays.

For a video you add the people who appear in it, with their portrait. They count for that person: click a name on the left and the video is in the list.

Names from Picasa. If you used Picasa, the menu has Read names from Picasa… (only when there are Picasa files in your photo folders). Fotusa reads Picasa’s frames and names, but only takes over a frame that falls exactly on a face Fotusa found itself — when in doubt, not. First you say per Picasa name who it is: the Same person as the name Fotusa suggests, Someone else, Rename… or Skip. Then the faces come as a question "is this …?"; nothing is confirmed straight away. Your choices sit beside your photos: if you later read in new folders, Fotusa only asks about names that were not there yet.

Searching

Type in the top bar. The app reads your sentence and splits it into chips below the field; together they are your question. The chips are the explanation as well: if you see folder · Crete while you thought you were searching everything, you know at once why so little is showing.

Image search works on what is in the photo, not on a list of categories somebody has to maintain: any word works, even one nobody has typed before. A single word also finds the end of a longer one: boat finds fishing boat.

What you wrote yourself comes before what the model sees. First come photos with that word in your own tags and caption, then photos taken at that place, if you typed a place name, then what the model recognises, from strongest to weakest likeness. Below the grid, 120 more with a lower score brings in the next layer. Every tag you set makes your whole collection easier to search — and that tag travels inside the file itself.

More like this. Right-click a photo or a selection → More like this: the app looks for photos that resemble it, closest first. That becomes a chip like any other, so it combines with the rest.

Image search needs a one-off pass over your whole collection in the background, and a 2.3 GB search model: menu → Download search by image (2.3 GB)…. That entry is only there while the model is missing. Until the pass is done, search works on what has been looked at so far. The model runs on your own machine; no photo leaves it.

Combining searches

Chips side by side must both be true. anna ben gives the photos they are on together, temple 2019 the temples from that year, anna beach thailand >2015 blurry exactly what it says. Every chip adds a condition, and so fewer photos. Only confirmed names count; a guess by the app never does.

*With the word or, one of the two is enough.* That becomes one chip with the values inside:

Or joins what is directly to its left and right, and nothing else. You cannot type a mix of kinds, such as anna or thailand. Instead, drag one chip onto the other: they become one chip with or between them. Click the word or to split them again.

To hide something, right-click the chip → Exclude instead. Then it reads not · person · Anna, and her photos drop out. That way you combine anything with anything: thailand, 2019, not · Ben, not · blurry.

Clicking a folder, album or person on the left replaces your previous choice there. What you typed and the filters stay. To keep a choice while you click on, pin it (see below).

Using search chips

Excluding is not the same as switching off. not · person · Anna takes Anna’s photos away; person · Anna switched off simply leaves them.

A pinned chip stays when you click something else on the left — you can tell by its coloured border. Without that, your previous folder, album or person goes as soon as you click on; that is the safe default, on purpose.

At the end of the row you see how many photos are left out of the total. If the app finds nothing, it says which chip causes that and how many you would get without it: one click switches that chip off.

Filters

At the top left is the Filters box. Everything you switch on there becomes a chip in the search line — so it can be excluded too — and stays when you choose a folder, album or person in the lists below.

Blurry looks for failed photos to throw away — a list to look through; the app never throws anything away itself. JPEG, PNG and RAW are measured, video is not. If a good photo ends up in the list: right-click → Keep — no longer count as blurry.

Blurry and camera settings together. Switch blurry on and exclude what is blurred on purpose: a long shutter speed (shutter>1/4) is often a deliberate motion shot, a small f-number (f<2.8) often deliberate bokeh. Right-click that chip → Exclude instead. Phones are always wide open, so excluding f<2.8 removes your phone photos as well.

A photo without that value is left out by a greater-than or less-than filter. Scans, screenshots and WhatsApp photos often carry no camera settings — just like a photo without a date in a date filter.

Timeline and life line

As long as no photo is chosen, the Info tab on the right shows a bar chart of what is on screen: how many photos per year. Every chip counts — one glance shows when the photos of a place, a person or a search were taken.

• Click a bar and the grid shows only that period, while the chart zooms in one step: years, then months, then days.
• With ‹ 2019 › you step to the previous or next year with photos without zooming out first. The trail at the top takes you back.
• Point at a bar for the exact number. Below the chart are the total and the busiest period.
• Photos without a real date taken do not count — a file date shifts when you copy. The line below the chart says how many there are.

Life line. Choose a person and click ◷ in their bar: you see that person’s faces per year, one row per year. What did Anna look like in 2012, 2016, 2020? Fill in a date of birth (right-click the name → Date of birth…) and the age is shown as well. A click on a year shows the photos from that year.

Arranging

• One click selects, a double click opens. Ctrl adds, Shift selects a range.
• Sort sits bottom left: by date or by name, another click reverses it.
• Below the grid you choose what the mouse wheel does, Browse or Zoom — with Ctrl held, the wheel does the other. The slider bottom right changes the thumbnail size.
• Right-click your selection: Into album…, Rename…, More like this and Move to Recycle Bin (Delete). With one photo there are also Show in Explorer, Open with… and Copy image. The Delete key deletes too, after a question.
• Tags and dates are set in the Info tab, rotating and Save as… in the Edit tab — for a selection too.
• Open with… hands the photo to another program. When you come back to Fotusa, the grid shows the new version.
• A collage or slideshow starts from the bar above a folder, an album or a person.

Dragging onto a folder moves the file, Ctrl copies it — as in Explorer. The app asks first whether that is right, with the count in it. The file really does move; the app never moves anything by itself.

• Only within your source folders. Not outside them — the photo would leave your collection.
• If a file of that name is already there, the newcomer gets a number after its name. Nothing is ever overwritten.
• Tags, caption, star, face names and albums travel along. A copy gets everything except the album and the portrait — an album 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 or by name. Favourites are a star per photo, and that goes into the file as an XMP rating.

Tags are free. In the Info tab they sit in one field, comma separated, beside the Caption; the field completes as you type. With several photos chosen, the field adds: Add to … photos… puts every tag on every photo.

The date comes from EXIF. If it is missing, the file date is used and (from the file) appears after Taken; that date only goes into the file when you change it. You correct it in the Info tab, with the pencil at Taken. With two or more photos — scans, a wrongly set camera clock — you choose Shift the series to here or Set to this date (shifting only works from a real capture date — without one there is no clock to shift from, so give such a photo a date with Set to this date first; Fotusa never sets a date by itself) there.

Renaming and saving as

Right-click a photo or a selection → Rename…. On the left is Order: blocks with a thumbnail that you drag into place, or set in one go with By date or By name. It opens sorted by capture date.

On the right you build the new name from a file-name pattern. Name holds [N] for the old name; the buttons add [C] for a counter, [YMD] for the date or [hms] for the time at the end. Extension keeps the old one with [E]. You also choose where the Counter starts, its step and how many digits, what to Search and Replace with, and whether letters become lower case, upper case or stay as they are.

• At the bottom every file shows its old and new name, and that list follows along as you type. A date becomes 2014-10-19, a time 14.22.05.
• A name that cannot be — empty, with a character Windows does not allow, already taken or twice in the list — turns red, and the Rename button stays disabled. Enter renames, just like the button.
• If another program holds a file open, the screen says so — for example a video player; close it and try again.
• If a photo has no capture date from the camera, the list says the file date is used. A RAW with the same name in the same folder goes along with its JPEG.
• Your faces, names and albums move along. If one file fails, everything goes back to the old names.
• Straight afterwards the same right-click menu holds Undo rename. Putting it back later is possible too, through menu → History and putting back.

Save as… in the Edit tab makes copies of your selection in another format: JPG, PNG, GIF or ICO, with a Longest side and a Quality. Pick the target folder in the tree on the left, or make a folder for them with Create a new folder. The window shows beforehand what the first photo becomes, in pixels and in bytes.

Sorting out bursts

A burst is a series of shots in quick succession: at least two photos, at most two seconds apart, with the same file-name pattern and a different number — even when they are spread over folders. If they have already been looked at for image search, they must also look strongly alike. RAW files form a burst of their own and never share one with a JPEG. Videos and photos without a capture date from the camera take no part.

Click Bursts under Filters on the left, or type burst in the search field. Below the grid Sort out bursts then appears: it takes the bursts now in view, one at a time.

• At the top it says which burst it is, in which folder, and how many photos.
• The photo under your mouse is shown large; below it the whole burst as a strip, with sharpest under the sharpest one.
• Click a photo to tick it. Nothing is ticked beforehand.
• Previous and Next go to another burst; what you ticked only applies to the burst in view.
• The button at the bottom sends what you ticked to the Recycle Bin, after a question. If a burst is left with one photo, it drops out of the list.

Fetching from camera and SD card

Menu → Fetch photos (camera)…. Fotusa looks for connected phones, cameras and memory cards, and while the window is open it keeps watching for newly connected devices. If it finds nothing, connect the device and click Search again. If there are several, the window says: Click the camera, phone or memory card you want to fetch photos from.

On the left you choose the folder they land in — you point at it, or make one with New folder; Fotusa never creates a folder by itself. On the right sits what is on the device, as Names or as Thumbnails.

• It works with phones, and with removable or network drives that have a DCIM, Pictures or Foto’s folder — such as a memory card, a card reader or a camera.
• Nothing is written to the device — it is copied, not moved.
• Fotusa remembers per device what you already fetched, file by file. Next time those photos are greyed out and unticked, with the count below the list. They do not disappear, so you can deliberately fetch them again; on opening only what is new is ticked.
• Where did you leave off? The empty from box shows fetched up to … in grey: up to that day you already have this device’s photos. Nothing disappears from view; a click makes it the limit, Whole device opens it again. To can never lie before from.
• All also ticks what you fetched before. If the same file — same name, same size — is already in the target folder, it stays grey and does not come along again.
• This still works if you later rename or move the photo in Fotusa.
• After copying the window stays open, and what came in is greyed out straight away.

What you already fetched is recorded beside your photos, in the same backup folder as your names. It survives a reinstall.

Connect a drive Fotusa does not know and it asks what it is; until you answer, it does nothing with it. Menu → Disks… lists the drives Fotusa knows. Per drive you choose Collection or Import source, give it a name, or Forget it.

Fotusa as photo viewer

Fotusa can be your photo viewer. In File Explorer, right-click a photo and choose Open with → Fotusa. To open every photo this way, choose Fotusa in Windows under Settings → Apps → Default apps.

The photo shows large at once, with the capture date after its name, and the other photos of the same folder along the top — also on a USB stick or in Downloads. Fotusa does not load your collection for this and changes nothing in your photos, unless you edit and save yourself.

• ← → or the wheel over the photo: previous or next. Home and End: first and last. Click a thumbnail to see that photo.
• Esc or the cross closes the viewer. Next time it opens at the same size and place.
• Open in Fotusa (bottom right) opens the photo in the full app, to edit it or name the people in it. If Fotusa is already running, that window comes forward with the photo open. If the photo belongs to another collection of yours, Fotusa starts on that collection this time only. If the photo is in no collection at all, that is not possible; the tip on the button says why.
• Editing a photo outside your collection: along the bottom are Left, Right, Auto-enhance and a caption box. ↶ Undo and ↷ Redo (also Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y). Nothing changes until you press Save (the original goes to the Windows Recycle Bin) or Save as… (a new JPEG in Best quality, Normal or Smaller file; the original stays). If you move on with something unsaved, the viewer asks first. Fotusa puts nothing next to the photo.
• If the photo belongs to your collection, you edit it in Fotusa (Open in Fotusa) — so the thumbnail and the faces stay right.

Duplicate photos

Menu → Find duplicate photos…. A window first asks where to look: photos, videos or both, optionally limited by size or capture date. It compares content, not names, and always compares the images as well.

The progress is at the bottom right; you can keep working meanwhile.

• Every byte identical — the same file, whatever it is called.
• Every pixel identical — a different file with exactly the same image; only name, date or the data inside the file differ.
• Same image, smaller or saved again — for instance a copy that came back through WhatsApp. The app only proposes the smallest copy; the original stays.
• Looks alike — a series, taken in quick succession, often with a sequence number in the name. These are not duplicates, so the app ticks nothing here.

The copies sit side by side in columns, with folder, file name, size and date beside the thumbnail, and per file a tick box and Move this one to Recycle Bin. One click on a thumbnail shows that copy in the panel on the right; a double click opens it. Right-click the copy that may go → Tick every duplicate in …. At the top, Delete from then shows the folder the duplicates leave, and Keeps the copy in the folder where the other copy stays. There you choose one other folder, or All files for every folder. Shift picks a range in the same column. Move ticked to Recycle Bin deletes what is ticked — the app never deletes anything by itself. Every deletion goes to the Recycle Bin; Do not ask again this session skips the question beforehand.

Under the heading of each group are Tick all and Tick none; they only affect that group. For real duplicates, Tick all ticks one side of each pair: the copy in the folder you ticked; without a folder, the copy in the folder where you already ticked the most yourself; otherwise, for saved again, the smallest. If there is nothing to choose, the app tells you to tick one copy or a folder first. For looks alike it ticks every photo except the best of each series — the sharpest, or without a sharpness measurement the largest; that one is marked with a ★.

The boxes and the names on faces move along by themselves. When you delete a copy of the same photo, its named boxes first move to the copy that stays — it is the same image, so the box fits exactly. That also goes for a name that is only on the copy that leaves. You do not have to do anything. With looks alike nothing moves: that is a different image.

Tags and caption do not move by themselves. They are shown as labels under the thumbnail of each copy; whatever is not on every copy is red. Drag a red label onto the copy that stays, or click it, and it goes into that file too: a tag is added, a caption is appended after the caption that was already there.

Files up to 64 MB are compared byte for byte. Above that, size, start and end are compared; those duplicates sit in a block of their own, because they are very likely, but not proven.

Every row says why it is there.

Overview and maintenance

Menu → Settings and maintenance…. The screen has three tabs: Overview, Settings (what Fotusa computes by itself on this PC, see Light mode) and Maintenance. It opens on Overview.

Overview counts within what is in the middle right now; without a filter that is the whole collection. Per group: photos, of which RAW and videos · with and without faces, with a name and with a face without a name · with and without date taken, with and without location · sharp and blurry.

• Click a number and you see exactly those files: the screen closes and a search block is added. A zero is not a button.
• While the app is still checking faces or sharpness, it says still busy and how far it is, instead of a number that changes later.
• Duplicate photos have no number: finding them reads your files themselves and takes a while. The button opens Find duplicate photos….
• Disk space shows per drive how much is free and what Fotusa keeps there next to your photos: thumbnails, faces, search by image, models, map tiles, temporary files, backup copies of your work and other computed data. Your photos themselves do not count.

Maintenance shows what work is stored — names, people, folders with names and chosen portrait photos — and what can be cleaned up.

• Check looks for names and faces of photos that Fotusa no longer finds in their place, and shows them per folder with the reason: folder no longer exists, folder is there, these files are not, or a folder Fotusa always skips. It deletes nothing.
• Take names along… only appears when the same photo is elsewhere in the collection — the same file, not just the same name. The names go to that photo. Remove faces… removes the faces of such a folder, after a question with the names that will go.
• Boxes from a replaced photo (card Tidy up faces): the boxes and names of a photo for which another file arrived under the same name. They come back by themselves when the original file is there again; Discard old boxes clears them.
• Names without faces (card Tidy up faces) lists the names that are on no face any more. Remove… takes them out everywhere, after a question.
• Free up space only clears computed data, such as Computed data of old collections (safe to delete). Your photos and your names stay.
• Backup elsewhere: Choose a place…, Make a copy now, Restore… and Turn off backup. See Where your work lives.

Fotusa bin. Every photo folder has a .Fotusa - prullenbak. It takes what Windows cannot put in its own Recycle Bin — on a network drive or a stick — and the original of a photo you overwrote after editing. The last card counts per photo folder what lies in it: how many, how big and since when. At Keep what Fotusa removes for you choose how long: 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days (30 unless you change it), per collection; below it stands roughly what that costs and how much is free on the drive. Put back… opens History and putting back, where you put back what Fotusa removed. Empty the Fotusa bin… removes it for good, after a question with the list.

When the drive runs out of space (less than 5 % or 2 GB free), Fotusa says so at the bottom, with Empty the Fotusa bin… next to it. Fotusa never removes anything earlier by itself. Before large writing work Fotusa checks that it fits; if it does not, it does not start, and the block at the bottom right says waiting for space on drive …. Free up space and Fotusa carries on by itself. Nothing is ever written halfway.

New versions. When there is a new version, the app says so after it starts, with the button Go to the download page. You download and install it yourself; the app fetches nothing.

History and putting back

Menu → History and putting back shows what Fotusa did with your photos, newest first: a star, tags, a date, moving, renaming, to the Recycle Bin, saving after editing, importing. Click a line to see per file what it was and what it became.

You also get there from the bin. After throwing away, the line at the bottom says … to the Recycle Bin — can be put back through History and putting back, with Put back… next to it. And the Fotusa bin card (menu → Settings and maintenance… → Maintenance) has Put back…. Both open this window at the top: what you just threw away is at the top of the list. Pick that line and Put back….

Your work beside the photos is in it too: a name on a face, a face added or removed, photos in an album, a group, a person renamed, chapters of a video, and what you read in from Picasa. There you see per change what it was and what it became (name: – → Yui). Putting a name back makes the photo file match again as well.

• Put back… first shows what goes back and what stays, with the reason. Nothing happens until you click Put back ….
• Only what has not changed since goes back. If you changed a file yourself afterwards, that stays; the question tells you which later action you can put back first.
• After putting back, Fotusa says where, for example Put back: IMG_1234.jpg in 2019/08 Thailand. The photo is back in your collection straight away; Show takes you to that folder.
• Putting back goes into the history too, so you can put it back again. You can put back after your licence ends as well: these are your own files.
• A turned or mirrored photo goes back with its face boxes. If something failed, the row says so, and each file shows the reason.
• What cannot come back: files deleted from a phone or card (they have no bin), and what is gone from the Windows Recycle Bin or the Fotusa bin.

The history lives beside your photos, in .Fotusa - reservekopie van je werk\handelingen, for a year. Every line carries a check number of the one before: if something in it was changed later, the history says so. It stays in your photo folder and never goes into an error report.

Light mode

For an older PC: Fotusa then only does viewing, organising and editing. Four parts Fotusa would otherwise work out by itself in the background; in light mode they are off:

• Recognise faces — finding faces and asking Is this Yui?. Drawing a frame and typing a name yourself always works.
• Search by image — typing what is in a photo. Searching by name, folder, date and tags stays.
• Measure sharpness — for the Blurry filter. What was already measured stays usable.
• Images from videos — one frame as the thumbnail. A video then shows the film icon; playing it works as usual.

You can turn it on in three places: when installing (Light), at the question after startup on a light PC, or from menu → Settings and maintenance… → tab Settings → Background work on this PC. There you turn each part on or off; Light mode turns all four off, Everything on turns them on again.

Is the background work slow?

Fotusa runs search by image on the graphics card. If your laptop has two — a power-saving one in the processor and a fast one (for example NVIDIA) — Fotusa picks the fast one itself. If that fails, you see Fotusa is using the power-saving graphics card above the block at the bottom right. To put Fotusa on the fast card:

• Windows: Settings → System → Display → Graphics. Add Fotusa (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Fotusa\fotusa.exe) and choose High performance. In Windows 11 the choice applies at once.
• NVIDIA: NVIDIA Control Panel → Manage 3D settings → Program Settings → choose Fotusa → High-performance NVIDIA processor.

Then restart Fotusa.

A lighter PC. Fotusa recommends 16 GB of memory, a separate graphics card and 4 or more processors. If your PC has less, Fotusa asks once at startup whether you want light mode. If you choose Not now, everything works, but the first background work (finding faces, search by image) takes much longer — sometimes days. Looking, drawing frames and giving names work as usual in the meantime, and what you do always goes before the background work.

Editing

The Edit tab in the right panel. With one or more thumbnails chosen, it holds rotating, Auto enhance, Save, Save as… and Cancel; you see the result on the thumbnails first. With a photo open, it holds everything below.

• Crop, Straighten, Straighten page, rotating (Left, Right) and flipping (Flip horizontal, Flip vertical). Rotating and flipping cost no quality: if you edited nothing else, only the orientation in the EXIF is changed. A flipped photo that you rotate stays flipped.
• Adjust: sliders for Exposure, Contrast, Clarity and Sharpen. Auto enhance fixes light and contrast in one click.
• Brush, with a size and an edge. Remove takes away spots, dust and scratches: go over them and press Apply. Heal and Clone take a spot you point at with Alt+click; healing matches the light and colour, cloning puts down an exact copy. Paint gives an area another colour, also one you pick from the photo.
• Red eye: click an eye. Works for animals too.
• You see every step at once; the file only changes when you save. Save puts the original in the Recycle Bin, Save as… leaves it in place. Cancel puts everything back.
• ↶ undoes a step, ↷ redoes it. Ctrl + Z does not apply here: that key takes back typed text.
• Editing does not work on RAW files. The tab then says why.

If there is an image on your clipboard, menu → Paste as new photo… turns it into a file. With Save as… you choose format, size, quality and name. It lands in the folder you are in on the left, and is called image if you fill in nothing; if that name exists, image (1). No file is ever overwritten.

On a video the Chapters tab takes the place of Edit: 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.

Map and location

The Location tab: where the photo was taken, as latitude and longitude. If a photo has no location, point at it on the map or look up a place name. The place only goes into the file with Record in the photo. A location can also be given to a whole selection at once.

The All photos on the map tick box puts your whole collection on it as density blooms: blue for a single photo, then green, orange and red where there are many. The blooms are translucent and run into one another. One glance shows where you have been.

Click a bloom and the grid shows the photos from that place. Ctrl-click adds a bloom, so you can look at several places at once; clicking the same bloom again takes it off — just as Ctrl works in the photo grid. If a circle is on the map, it steps aside: it stays as a dotted outline and takes over again once you remove your last bloom.

To select an area, right-click the map → Place circle here, and everything inside comes into the grid. It starts at a quarter of what you can see. If a circle is already there, it moves to your click and keeps its size. The blooms and the circle can be on together.

• Dragging at the edge changes the radius, the centre stays. Grabbing the middle shifts the whole circle, the radius stays.
• The photo count runs along while you drag.
• The radius stays between 100 metres and 500 kilometres.
• Remove circle in the same menu removes the circle and the filter with it.

The wheel zooms, and whatever sits under your mouse stays there.

Keyboard

RAW files

RAW takes part fully. Your .nef, .cr2, .arw, .raf, .dng and the other RAW kinds sit in the grid with a thumbnail, are searchable by image, count towards faces, and take names, tags and captions like any other photo.

Fotusa needs no built-in RAW converter: every RAW file carries a JPEG of the shot inside it, made for the screen on the back of the camera. Fotusa uses it. With most brands that is the full shot; with some, such as Fujifilm, a smaller one.

If you shoot RAW + JPEG together, there are two files of the same shot, and by default you see both: Fotusa hides nothing by itself. Under Filters on the left sit the JPEG, RAW and Video switches. Turn RAW off and you see no RAW file at all; turn JPEG off and you see only the RAWs. Off means hidden, not gone — nothing leaves the disk — and one kind always stays on.

When something goes wrong

If the app gets stuck on something, a window appears: Fotusa ran into something. Your photos and your work are untouched — they live next to the photos, not inside the app. After Close the app simply carries on.

The app wrote down what happened, and that report is shown in full in the window, under This is what gets sent:. So you see beforehand exactly what is in it: the version, your graphics card, how many files and folders you have, the error itself and the last lines from the log. Folder and file names and the names of people and albums are taken out before you see the report. If you send it, the email address of your licence goes along.

• Send it to Havun sends the report to us.
• Save as a file puts it on your desktop, as Fotusa-foutrapport- followed by the date, so you can attach it to an email yourself.
• A report never leaves by itself — only when you press the button.
• We keep a sent report for 90 days, then it is deleted. We read it, also with the help of Claude by Anthropic (US), only to fix the error.
• We do not keep your IP address, and reporting works without a licence too.

Reporting a problem

Is something stuck or not right? Menu → Report a problem…. Briefly describe what is happening (optional) and click Send it to Havun. You first see exactly what goes along: what the app was doing and what it wrote down. Your photos, files and names are not included. Rather email it yourself? Choose Save as a file; the report lands on your desktop.

Limits

• No cloud: your collection is not uploaded anywhere.
• No account to see your photos — the app does not know who you are, and there is nothing to log in to.
• No external AI — all recognition runs on this computer. Only the search model is fetched, once.
• No video editing. Image search looks at photos only — but chapters, names, location, tags and caption make a video just as findable.
• No undo for a move inside the app: Explorer and the Recycle Bin are there for that.

What does leave your PC, and nothing else: the map tiles for the area you are looking at, a place name you look up, the search model once, the licence check with our server, the question whether there is a new version, and an error report if you send it. None of them contains your photos.

The trial

Without a licence Fotusa reads 1,000 files of your collection, at most ten of them videos — from the folders you click. On the left you see all your folders with their counts; click one and Fotusa reads it in, up to a thousand. Those thousand work fully: browsing, searching, naming faces, editing and exporting.

• Your other photos stay where they are. They are simply not read.
• The limit counts across your whole collection, not per photo folder. Once it is reached, a folder you open after that stays empty, with the button Request licence.
• From 800 on, the footer says how many there are. At 1,000 one window explains it; it blocks nothing.
• After activating, the rest comes in by itself.
• During the trial you work in one collection.

Activating

There is no password and no code to type.

• In Fotusa: menu → Licence… (or the Request licence button at 1,000 files; it opens the same window).
• Enter your email address and click Request licence.
• You get an email with a link. Open that link on the computer where Fotusa is installed, not on your phone.
• Keep Fotusa running while you click — the licence window may be closed. Fotusa picks up the licence itself, even after a restart, while the link is valid (15 minutes). The line at the bottom says when it is in.
• Fotusa then reads in the rest of your collection.

Requesting again on the same computer costs no extra place: that computer only counts once.

A year’s licence, and after

A licence is valid for one year, on two computers at once per email address. It does not renew by itself and nothing is ever charged. Five weeks before the end date you get an email. To continue, buy a new licence. Buy before the end date and your new year starts on that end date, so you lose no days. The end date is shown in the app under About Fotusa. There is no refund if you change your mind: that is what the trial version is for, with a thousand files and no time limit. If Fotusa does not work as described and we cannot fix it, you get the unused part of the year back (terms, article 7).

In the last month the right side of the footer briefly says Licence until …. In the last week that becomes Licence: … days left, and on the last day Licence: last day today, with the Renew button next to it. That button takes you to the customer portal.

After the end date, what you did stays usable. You see everything that was in Fotusa on the end date, with your names, albums, tags, captions and places. You browse, open and search — by free text, by image and on what is already there. Exporting stays too: choose photos and put them in a folder or on a stick with Save as…. Your photos and what you entered yourself always remain yours.

What stops is anything that adds or changes something. New photos are no longer read in. Rescan folders and adding a photo folder are no longer possible. You no longer give names or set places, stars, tags, captions, albums or chapters. Editing is not possible, not even rotating. Collage, face movie and fetching photos stop too. In the search line only words, names, albums and tags still work: no filters on date, size, camera settings, bursts, blurry, 360° or RAW, and switching a chip off or excluding it is not possible. For deleting, moving and renaming, use Windows itself.

If the folder .Fotusa - rekenwerk (niet aankomen) is lost or damaged after the end date, Fotusa does not rebuild it. You then work in the trial, up to 1,000 files. On another computer you also start with the trial after the end date. Buy again and you carry on where you were.

What we know about you

The app does not know you, but your licence does. For the licence there is one row on our server: your email address, how long your licence runs, and which computers it is in use on. Without it we cannot renew, and you cannot release a computer when you get rid of one.

• There is no password. You enter your address and get a link by mail — for activating and for the customer portal.
• What never goes there: your photos, your names, your albums, your searches — not even in an error report.
• You see and change it yourself in the customer portal: renew, release a computer, invoices.

In the app itself it sits under About Fotusa: whose name the licence is in, how long it runs, and how many computers it was on when it was issued. Manage my licence takes you to the customer portal.

Coming from another program

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

Names that another program wrote into your photos as XMP are recognised by Fotusa and kept out of your tag list. It does not take them over as names on faces: those you give in Fotusa itself.