digital asset management

A collection is a set of images matching a given selection criteria.

The most basic kind of collection is a film roll, which contains all of the images that have been imported from a specific folder on disk. Whenever you import images from the filesystem, those images are organized in a film roll whose name is derived from that of their parent folder.

You can easily construct other kinds of collection based on various image attributes (Exif data, filename, tags etc.) in the collections module. Multiple criteria can be logically combined to narrow or extend your collection.

Each image in the current collection is represented by a thumbnail in the lighttable view and filmstrip module. A cache of the most recently used thumbnails is stored in a file on disk and loaded into memory at startup. The size of this cache can be adjusted in Preferences > Processing > CPU, GPU, Memory.

Star ratings and color labels help you to sort and rank images according to your own criteria. An image’s star rating and color labels can be displayed over thumbnails in the lighttable view and filmstrip module.

Grouping images helps to improve the structure and clarity of your image collection when displayed in the lighttable view.

You can combine images into a group by selecting them and clicking the “group” button in the selected image(s) module, or by pressing Ctrl+G. Likewise, you can remove selected images from a group by clicking the “ungroup” button, or pressing Ctrl+Shift+G.

Duplicated images are automatically grouped together. Similarly, if you import multiple images from the same directory, having the same base name, but different extensions (eg. IMG_1234.CR2 and IMG_1234.JPG), those images automatically form a group.

Ansel allows you to store additional information about your images to allow them to be more easily searched and grouped. This information is stored in Ansel’s database and XMP sidecar files and can also be included within exported images.