Getting started

Start Glimt on a folder or an image (glimt ~/Pictures, glimt photo.jpg), or from the application menu, which opens your home folder (or the last one, with "Start in the last used folder" in Preferences).

The whole manual is in the user guide, and the options for starting Glimt are under Command line.

The keys used most

F1 opens the help, with every key and a keyboard map.

Key	Does
→ ↓ Space, ← ↑ Backspace	Next and previous image; Home and End for the first and last
F (or F11), Esc	Full screen, and back
+ and −, Z, X	Zoom in and out, 1:1, fit to the window
H, W	Fit the width, the height, for every image until X
] and [	Turn right and left
S	Slideshow, start and stop
T, Ctrl+K	Thumbnails in the file list, the EXIF panel
I	Image info over the image in full screen
Ctrl+J, D	Pan view by date, Find Duplicates
Ctrl+R, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+M	Rename (several selected: Rename Many), copy, move
Delete, Shift+Delete	To the trash, delete for good (both ask first)
Ctrl+O, F1	Preferences, the help

Searching

Press / (or click the field above the file list) and type three or more letters: the list shows the names that match, best first, ignoring case and gaps. Ctrl+A selects every match, to copy, move, rename or print them together.

Type	Finds
sun	Names with s, u, n in that order: sunflower, sunrise, also desert_dunes
exif:canon 2024:05	Photos whose EXIF, keywords or comment have every word: a Canon, May 2024
exif:oslo	Photos with Oslo in a keyword, the comment or an EXIF field
re:^img_\d+\.jpe?g$	Names matching a regular expression, ignoring case
exif:re:canon.*2024:0[5-7]	A regular expression on the EXIF, keywords and comments
mark:2, stars:3	Files with mark 2, or with three stars
sunset exif:canon stars:3	Terms one after the other: all must match
sunset -exif:iphone	- before exif:, re:, mark: or stars:: leave those out
exif:canon | exif:nikon	| between terms: either
sunset ( exif:canon | exif:nikon )	Parentheses group, as words of their own with spaces around them

The words after a prefix belong to it, so a search of the names comes first. A search of one term ranks the names best first; a combined one keeps the list's order.

The first exif: search in a folder reads every file once, which takes a while in a large one; later searches are at once. Preferences can make the field a regular expression always, with Case beside it for upper and lower case. The sort menu at the bottom left sorts the list by name, number, date, EXIF date, size or extension, and the Types menu beside it chooses whether it shows images, RAW files and videos.

Keywords, stars and comments

The EXIF panel (Ctrl+K) shows the keywords and comment of the image, and a keyword tree such as Places → Norway → Oslo, with a box for each. The keys 1 to 6 set marks, Alt+0 to Alt+5 the stars, and Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+6 select the images with a mark. Keywords and comments go to an XMP sidecar next to the image, which darktable, digiKam, Lightroom and Immich read, and the stars too when Preferences says so. Below the comment, Alt text and Extended description are IPTC's fields for someone who cannot see the picture: screen readers and web pages read them.

A slideshow in your own order

A plain text file with one image on each line, relative to the file or absolute, plays in its order (Glimt 0.25.0 or newer); # starts a comment, and .m3u playlists work too:

glimt --slideshow --fullscreen ~/show.txt

Glimt never writes such a list. A collection (File → Collections) is the other way to keep a selection from many folders.