Note
Archived discussion. This page is a verbatim copy of a thread from
community.ansel.photos, the Ansel community forum, which ran from March 2023
until it was taken offline in June 2025 after the site was compromised — a counterfeit
site had been planted inside the forum software, so the whole thing had to come down.
The original address was https://community.ansel.photos/view-discussion/can-you-open-images-without-importing.
No crawler ever captured this particular thread, so the text below — taken straight from the forum database — is the only copy left.
Answers may refer to older versions of Ansel, and image attachments did not survive the shutdown. Current discussion happens on GitHub Discussions .
Posted by ax84ch on 2024-06-06.
I’ve searched for this and used Chantal AI. I thought I saw something about a file manager that people didn’t know existed in DT.
At this point in time, I don’t want to import all my photos and have a database. Is there a way that I’m missing in Ansel to just open files from the filesystem without importing first?
Many thanks for the efforts with Ansel.
Replies
Aurélien Pierre — 2024-06-06
Ansel/DT are hard-wired to save editing histories into the DB, so you need to import images into the DB no matter what. Both software can write sidecar XMP files, but those are only redundancies to share/sync editings in a portable way. The backbone is still the DB.
ax84ch — 2024-06-06
Thank you for the confirmation. I guess I need to just “get over it” in my mind.
Translated from English by : Claude. In case of conflict, inconsistency or error, the English version shall prevail.