Portman2 is in beta. Features are still being added, nothing here should be taken as final, and things can change or be removed without notice.

Contents

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How Portman2 works, a part of the app at a time. Ctrl+F1 in the app opens the page for whatever you are looking at.

Browse your library

Browse every photo and video in your library in one grid — by album, tag or date — and star, hide, rotate or select them, with Undo for most changes.

The main window: a grid of every photograph and video in the library, with the sidebar of albums, tags, library views and dates down its left. Almost everything in Portman2 starts here.

The photo viewer

Look through your photos one at a time, large: flick through with the arrow keys, zoom in, see the histogram and file facts, and star, file or delete as you go.

The viewer shows one photo or video at a time over a blurred view of the grid, and lets you page through the grid it was opened from.

Photos in their own windows

Open a photo in a window of its own and keep it beside the grid or on another monitor — a reference while you work, or several photos side by side.

Each window is sized to the photo, and several can be open at once.

Compare & pick the best photos

Cull a shoot down to the keepers: Portman2 lays the photos out side by side, you drop the weaker ones a few at a time, and only the best are left.

It changes nothing until you confirm, and what confirming does depends on where you started.

Edit photos

Colour grade a whole shoot at once, copy one photo's look to fifty others, crop, straighten or go black and white — and the original is always kept.

The editor adjusts the light, colour and framing of one photo or of a whole selection at once, previewing every change live.

Slideshows

Play any album, date or selection as a full-screen slideshow with crossfades, Ken Burns pans or a moving 3D photo wall — on a second screen or the TV too. A slideshow plays a view, a selection or an album full screen, as a flat show with transitions or as one of two moving 3D scenes. It can also drive the other screens of Multi screen.

Multi screen

Show your photos on a second monitor, the television, or every tablet and phone in the house — each following what you browse, or showing something of its own.

Multi screen puts Portman2 on more than one screen at once: the other displays on this computer, tablets and phones showing the live page, and screens lent by other computers that share the library.

Search your photos

Find any photo by album, tag, date or file name, describe what is in it — "children on a beach" — or find every photo that looks like the one you have.

Three ways to find photos: the Ctrl+F box, which narrows the grid by words; "Photos that look like…", which ranks the grid by a sentence; and Find similar, which finds photos that look like the one you have.

Albums, tags and keywords

Organise photos into albums and tags without moving a file, file them with one keypress, and let Portman2 recognise what is in each photo on your own computer.

Albums and tags are the two ways to file photos by hand. An album is a place in a tree, and a photo can be in any number of them; a tag is a label. Keywords are labels the keyword model puts on photos for you.

Import and convert

Import photos and videos from a camera card or a phone folder, filed by date with duplicates skipped — or let Portman2 import new ones automatically.

Converting compresses videos into smaller files to save disk space, and combining joins several clips into one.

Trash, delete and restore

Clear out the photos you do not want, safely: the trash keeps them until you empty it, trashing can be undone, and Portman2 keeps the original of what it changes.

Deleting in Portman2 happens in two steps. Moving a photo to the trash only marks it, and it can be restored; deleting forever removes the file from disk and cannot be undone.

Find duplicate photos

Find duplicate photos, near-duplicates and bursts of shots across your whole library, keep the best of each group in one click and send the rest to the trash.

Portman2 finds photos that look the same and gathers them into groups for you to review. Nothing is removed until you choose.

Videos

Keep your videos beside your photos: play, trim and colour grade them, and find the biggest ones and compress them to free up disk space.

Portman2 keeps the original of anything it changes.

Phones, tablets and the LAN

View your photo library on any phone, tablet or computer in the house over Wi-Fi, in its web browser — no app to install.

With the LAN server on, they can browse, play slideshows, download, file photos into albums, and show a live mirror of what the desktop is showing.

Libraries and replicas

Share one photo library between several computers, with albums, tags, stars and edits kept in step between them — and keep separate libraries for family and work.

One installation of Portman2 can hold several libraries, each a folder of photos with a catalogue of its own. And one library can be opened on several computers at once — each a replica, exchanging albums, tags and edits with the others.

Settings

Back up the library to another disk, keep albums in step with QuMagie on a QNAP NAS, share the library with phones, and choose how photos look on every screen.

Settings opens over the window with a list of sections down its left and, where a section has several panes, tabs across the top. Each item here describes one pane.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every keyboard shortcut in Portman2, a screen at a time: the grid, the viewer, the editor, Compare & pick, slideshows, search and Multi screen.

In the app, hold F1 to see the keys that work where you are, and press Ctrl+F1 to come to the page about it.