Ratings and labels

You can give each photo one to five stars and a color label. In Gallery and Icons, they appear in the corner of the thumbnail; in Tiles, as stars on the second line; in Details, in the “Rating” column, which you can sort by.

How to set them.

• In Gallery, digits 1–5 give stars to all selected photos, and 0 clears the rating. Shift+digit sets a color label; pressing the same one again removes it.
• With the mouse, use the stars and label circles at the bottom of the Preview pane. With several photos selected, the rating applies to all of them (“and N more” appears next to it); in a pair and in full screen, each photo gets its own.
• In other views, digits type a file name, so there you rate with the mouse.

Stars and the label don't depend on each other. A batch of ratings is undone with a single Ctrl+Z. Files don't jump around when you rate them: when sorted by rating, they move into place after F5.

The filter in the file toolbar appears in a folder that has rated photos, works in all views, and resets when you go to another folder. To have a folder remember its filter, turn on “The same rating and label filter” in “Settings” → “File list”.

• Clicking a star keeps only photos with that rating, clicking it again clears the filter, and Ctrl+click adds or removes a single rating. For example, Ctrl+click on the fourth and fifth stars keeps four- and five-star photos.
• The crossed-out star keeps unrated photos.
• Color labels work the same way.
• The reset button ↺ clears the filter.

Where the rating is stored. In a companion file next to the photo: .xmp (Adobe, darktable, exiftool) or .pp3 (RawTherapee); the photo itself isn't changed. If several companions have a rating, it's read from the program's file (darktable's IMG.CR2.xmp or IMG.CR2.pp3), and whatever that file lacks, from the next one, down to IMG.xmp; the tooltip on the stars names the files. A new rating is written to all of them, and always to .pp3, even if RawTherapee hasn't put one there yet. For a photo without a companion, the stars are dimmed, and the first rating creates that file. Wander asks first; you can turn the question off in “Settings” → “File operations” → “Ratings”. Ctrl+Z deletes the created file.

Rating from the camera. Stars set in the camera, in File Explorer or on export are read from the photo itself: RAW, JPEG, TIFF, HEIC. They look like regular ones and work the same way in the filter and in sorting; the tooltip on the stars says the rating comes from the photo. Wander doesn't change the photo itself: a new rating goes to a companion, and you can also clear the camera's rating: Wander then creates a companion with a zero rating, asking first, as for any new companion. A rating in a companion takes precedence over a rating in the photo.

.xmp or .pp3. By default, Wander creates .xmp: it affects nothing but the rating. .pp3 is a RawTherapee settings file: as soon as it appears next to a photo, RawTherapee stops applying its default processing profile to that photo, even if the file has a single line. RawTherapee (since version 5.11) sees ratings in .xmp only when "Load/Save thumbnail rank and color from/to XMP sidecars" is on in its preferences, on the File Browser tab; otherwise it shows the rating from .pp3 or from the photo itself. You can switch to .pp3 on the same settings page.