Hi Megan – thanks for commenting. Your RAW files can be stored in whichever location you’d like them to be. We recommend saving images on your computer’s hard drive because of access speed, but your images don’t have to be saved there. Modern external drives use very fast connections, so Exposure’s performance can be just as responsive as when your photos are on your computer’s hard drive.

I appreciate the comments, Charles. I have logged them for our design team to consider when tackling this feature.

I was perhaps one of Apple’s very first Aperture customers so that’s nearly 13 years worth of files. I don’t realistically expect any one “solution” to be exact.

Hi Charles,

Thanks for the note, and for trying out Exposure. At the moment, Exposure’s keyword searching is scoped to the folder you’re working in and its subfolders. So we recommend organizing your photos in a single folder hierarchy if you need to search across your entire library.

In a future version, we’d like to add a way to search all folders you have bookmarked in the folders panel. Would that meet your needs?

I understand the advantages to your catalog free system but don’t yet understand how this would work with very large libraries. to find specific keywords images would I need to do individual searches across various folders? Would all images need to be stored in a single folder?

Hi Dan,

We are blushing over here! Thanks so much for the kind words. I’m very glad Exposure has been helpful to you. We’ll keep working to add new features to Exposure, but reliability and ease-of-use are always our top priority.

Hi Rob,

Exposure doesn’t have a feature to find duplicate files in the way you describe, unfortunately. There are lots of specialized apps available that find and remove duplicate files.

When you’re copying images from a camera card to your computer, Exposure has a checkbox to only copy new photos. It’s a handy feature, but it only applies to images that you copy to your computer using Exposure. If you suspect that you already have duplicate files, I suggest using a duplicate file finder app.

Thanks for commenting, Tomas. I see the point you make about newer photo organizing features in Exposure, but there were lots of editing features added as well. The new side-by-side comparison view and the preset audition functionality make selecting the perfect preset much quicker, there are new control sliders for Blacks, Whites, Oranges, and Purples, and there are a slew of improvements made to using overlays, such as new blend modes, the ability to import a batch of custom overlay files, and there are plenty of new light effects overlays, too.

You can always give the free trial a spin to see if you like the new version. Check it out, here.

Thanks for suggesting it. I could see how that would be useful.

Hi Haris – Always glad to hear from people who love Exposure. Thanks for commenting. Tethered shooting is something that we have on our list of features to add in a future version.

That’s true, many type of users, and many would probably check the hiding option even if it was on an advanced features with a caution message and then dont know what happened to their files.

And yes! while Exposure does a nice magical work when you use a file manager to move files, sometimes it fails.
But then, doing something like copy photos to a new location or delete photos on a file manager, Exposure magic won’t work, since Exposure won’t remove the sidecar or copy the sidecar to the new location. Which is obvious, but would be avoided by using always Exposure.

So while I do it always inside Exposure to avoid any issue, having a nice file manager, with some more advanced features to manage files faster inside exposure would make the experience even better, and then like you say, people won’t see the sidecar folder or anything, so they might not get bothered by it and everyone happy!

Hi Emi – thanks for commenting! Yes, we recommend using Exposure to move files because it will do a better job keeping track of the sidecars. Plus, you really don’t even see the sidecar files if you use Exposure to move images.

In theory it sounds like a good solution to hide sidecar folders, unfortunately it would likely cause more problems than it would solve. Having them easy to see also makes them easy to find, so people are aware of them now, which is great.

Thanks for the suggestion about adding a separate file interface. I’ll run that by the design team.

One thing that people have to understand AND use, if they dont already, is Exposure’s interface to move files, since that will ensure that the exposure sidecar file with all the data, will move along with the photo to the new location.

And that makes me think about something, that maybe Exposure should add like a little separate file manager window, so we have a window with a better file structure to make it easy for other people to move files around, not as advanced as explorer or finder but something easier to navigate, that can be resized and used to move files faster for other people.

Also, I have seen people complaining about how Exposure creates a folder and then every folder has to have the “Alien Skin” subfolder.
I am thinking, maybe Exposure settings should include a check box so it makes the folder hidden by default? and then people like on Windows Explorer can decide if they need to see hidden files or not, just by checking and unchecking “show hidden files”.

I still think Exposure workflow is great, and I can’t wait to see what you bring on next update for sure!