Your first import

Reveal starts empty. Photos get in by two doors: a folder you already have, or a memory card. Both end in the same place, a library: a folder Reveal knows about and keeps an index of.

Add a library

Click the + in the sidebar (Add catalogue) and pick a folder. Reveal walks everything under it, reads the capture dates and any existing sidecars, and fills the sidebar with a folder tree and a photo count on every row. The sidebar shows a count while it reads. If you have no library yet, the same action is offered as an Index a library button.

Nothing in the folder is changed. The index lives in Reveal’s own data folder and can be thrown away; see Files and sidecars.

Two rules to know:

• Libraries do not nest. A folder already inside a library is already part of it, and a folder that contains a library asks you to remove that library first. Removing a library only makes Reveal forget it; your photos stay where they are.
• A library can be offline. If it lives on a network drive that is not mounted, it stays in the sidebar, marked unavailable, and cannot be rescanned until the drive is back.

Import from a card

Put a card in the reader. Reveal notices a removable volume with a DCIM folder and offers it: a small floating panel says Card detected with the number of RAW files, and the sidebar shows an Import button with the card’s name and count. Click it to start.

An import:

1. Copies each file from the card into your archive, through a temporary file, so an interrupted copy never leaves a half-written photo. The card is only read.
2. Files each photo into a dated folder from its capture date, keeping the original filename.
3. Skips a file that is already there. A file with the same name and the same bytes is not copied twice, so importing the same card again is safe. A different photo that happens to share a name gets a numbered suffix instead of overwriting anything.
4. Prepares previews as it goes, so the grid is ready by the time the copy finishes.

The panel shows the frame being copied, a progress bar, the folder it is going to, and a Stop button. Stopping lets the file in flight finish, then ends cleanly. When it is done it summarises (imported, skipped, failed) and offers Eject, so you can pull the card out. Reveal then opens the last folder it filed into.

If you prefer it hands-free, turn on Auto-import in Settings: a card is imported the moment it is detected, with no confirmation.

Where files go

An import goes into the import folder: right-click any folder in the sidebar and choose Set as import folder. If you never chose one, it goes to the top of your first library.

It always lands inside a library. Reveal never creates a library on its own; if the import folder is not inside one, it says so before copying anything and imports nothing. Add the folder as a library first, or pick an import folder that already is in one. If the destination is a network drive that is not mounted, it tells you that instead.

Inside the import folder, photos are filed by your date folder pattern. By default it is Year/Year-Month-Day, so a photo taken on 14 September 2026 goes to 2026/2026-09-14/. You can change the pattern in Settings.

What happens after

• The new folder appears in the sidebar, with its count, and opens in the grid.
• Each photo gets a developed IMG.preview.jpg beside it, 2048 pixels on the long edge. See Files and sidecars.
• If you set a default import preset in Settings, it is applied to every photo as it arrives, so a whole card starts with your look. Photos without development settings use the default engine.
• If AI culling is on, the best frames of each day are picked right after the import. See AI culling.

From here you look at the grid, rate with 1 to 5, and move on to Develop.