Everything it does, and how to ask for it.

Connecting

The sidebar has two sections. Servers holds network shares — SMB and DLNA. Locations holds folders on disks attached to the Mac. Each section leads with its own quiet add row, and those rows are also the empty state: Add Server… and Add Folder…

A server on your network

Choosing Add Server… — or pressing ⇧⌘N — opens a sheet with two ways in, side by side. They are alternatives, not steps.

On the left, On Your Network lists what Baryta can hear while the sheet is open: DLNA media servers answering a discovery sweep, and SMB hosts advertising themselves over Bonjour. The list is judged rather than raw — devices with nothing browsable on them are left out, and so are audio-only fleets, because every speaker in a living room advertises a media server for its own music index and would bury the NAS you came for.

• A DLNA server is saved and connected the moment you click it. There is nothing else to enter; the sheet closes.
• An SMB host fills the form on the right with its name and moves on to the share, because a share name and credentials are still yours to give. The name is quietly replaced with a connectable address once it resolves.

If the list stays empty, the message tells you where to look: macOS requires explicit permission for an application to speak to devices on your network, under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network. Discovery hears nothing at all until Baryta is allowed there.

A server by address

On the right, By Address is the manual route, and the one to use when a NAS is on another subnet or has discovery switched off.

1. Enter the Host — a host name or an IP address. If a .local name gives trouble, the IP address is the more reliable of the two.
2. Enter the Share — the share’s name as the NAS publishes it, not a path. Folders inside it come later, in the tree.
3. Either tick Connect as guest, or enter a User and Password. Guest works only if the share itself allows anonymous reads.
4. Decide about Save password in Keychain. It is off by default: leave it off and the password is held for this session only. Tick it and the password goes into your Mac’s own Keychain, where you can inspect or delete it yourself in Keychain Access.
5. Press Test to try the connection without committing to it. A success reports the SMB dialect it negotiated and how many items it found in the root — for example Connected over SMB 3.0.2 — 14 items in the root. A failure reports what the server actually said.
6. Press Add.

Baryta speaks SMB 2 and 3 only. SMB 1 is long deprecated and is not implemented; if a NAS offers nothing newer, its own settings will have an option to enable SMB 2 or 3.

A folder on this Mac

Add Folder… opens a standard Open panel asking you to choose a folder of photos to browse. Because Baryta is sandboxed, that panel is how it earns access — the same one-time grant that Capture One and Lightroom ask for. The grant is remembered, so the folder is there again next launch. This is also the way to browse a card reader or an external disk.

Living with the tree

Folders expand in place, the way they do in an editing application, rather than drilling in like the Finder. Expanding a folder is what makes Baryta ask the server about it — the tree is a live view of the protocol, not a scan — which is why a folder shows its photograph count only once it has been opened. Nothing is walked ahead of you.

Right-clicking a row in the sidebar offers Reload, and on the root row of a server, Disconnect. Disconnect is also how a server is removed: it forgets the entry and deletes any password it saved for it.

The grid

Selecting a folder fills the window with its photographs. Thumbnails arrive in whatever order gets them there fastest — the previews the camera wrote into the files, the ones the NAS already generated, and Baryta’s own downsampled decode — so the sheet paints long before every file has been read.

One click selects. A double-click opens, and so do Return and Space. The selection is a ring drawn on the picture itself; if filenames are switched on, the label underneath never joins in, because the photograph is the thing being chosen.

The arrow keys move the selection, not the sheet. The view holds still while the selected tile is whole and clear, and scrolls the least amount that brings it back when it isn’t — the eye follows the ring rather than the lattice. Page Up and Page Down move a viewport’s worth of whole rows and keep the column; Home and End land on the first and last photograph. Pressing into a wall lands on it.

Thumbnail size is the slider in the window bar, ⌘+ and ⌘-, or a pinch on the trackpad. Size moves in whole columns: one step per press or per pinch, with the selected photograph holding its place in the window while everything else flies to its new box. Past the largest size there is one more step, and it opens the photograph.

There is no search field, and no albums, faces, dates or ratings. Baryta gives you the folders you already made. This is deliberate and permanent.

Looking at a photo

Opening flies the thumbnail you clicked out to the photograph’s own framing. If the picture is already decoded it lands sharp; if it is still coming over the network, the enlarged thumbnail is the wait state, and a ring beneath it says the work is going on. The ring never closes, because nobody knows how long a NAS will take.

The three framings

The right of the window bar reads FIT FILL 1:1 with a slider beside it. Those are the three named landings:

Fit

The whole photograph in the window. Fit means fit in both directions — a picture smaller than the window is enlarged to fill it, so every file opens the same way.

Fill

The window covered with no letterboxing, the overflow available to pan. Dimmed when the photograph’s shape already matches the window and there would be nothing to fill.

1:1

One image pixel to one screen pixel, which on a Retina display is genuinely one image pixel per hardware pixel. This is the pixel-peeping landing. It is dimmed when the display already out-resolves the file: there is nothing above fit to reveal, and the ceiling comes down to meet it.

Between fit and 1:1 the zoom is continuous, and every instrument reaches the same axis: the slider, a pinch on the trackpad, the scroll wheel of a mouse, ⌘+ and ⌘-. A double-click — or Z — is the stepped instrument: it goes to 1:1 centred on the point you aimed at, and back to the framing it came from. Trying to zoom past 1:1 meets an elastic wall that snaps back, because there is nothing there.

What a photograph opens at is a setting. By default it is Automatic, which fills the window when filling hides little of the image and fits otherwise — so a 4:3 or 16:9 landscape fills a wide window, while a square or a portrait keeps its whole frame. You can pin it to Fit or Fill instead, under Settings → Viewer.

Panning and the navigator

When the photograph overflows the window, dragging it moves it, and the cursor becomes a closed hand for as long as you hold on. Two-finger scrolling on a trackpad pans as well — that gesture is a hand on the picture. A mouse wheel does something different: it zooms, anchored under the pointer, which is also how a tablet’s ring behaves.

Right-clicking summons the navigator — a small floating card showing the whole photograph with a rectangle marking what you are looking at. Drag the rectangle to pan, click to jump, double-click inside it to go to 1:1 at that spot. N does the same as right-clicking. Right-click is deliberately spent on this and there is no context menu on the photograph.

A note for anyone comparing frames: Keep zoom across photos is on by default, so an inspection zoom and its position carry to the next photograph — the A/B sharpness check this exists for. Only a real inspection zoom rides along. Anything at or below Fill is a framing rather than a judgement, and framings are decided fresh for each photograph.

Getting out, and getting out of the way

Return and Space are the round trip. In the grid they open the selection; in the viewer they back out exactly one level — a zoom returns to the photograph’s own framing, and that framing returns to the grid. One key walks the whole way back without skipping a step. Esc, G and B go straight to the grid, as do ⌘G and ⌘B.

A single click on the photograph hides the window bar, leaving nothing on screen but the picture — in an ordinary window, not only in full screen. Clicking again brings it back, and so does T. The bar is also the window’s drag handle, and when a photograph has nothing to pan, dragging it moves the window.

The bar’s centre holds ‹ ▶ › — the arrow keys’ walk for a hand already on the mouse, and the way into a slideshow. Left of the zoom controls sit the two things you can do to a photograph rather than with it: share and the information toggle. Sharing hands the original file, under its real name, to whatever you point it at; nothing is re-encoded on the way out. The file is staged the moment the photograph settles, so the picker opens instantly instead of stalling on a NAS.

The information readout

I cycles it. It is set like the back of a camera rather than an inspector: bare type in the bottom-left corner over the photograph, no panel and no scrim, unfolding upward. Each level contains the one below it, so cycling never jump-cuts.

Level 1 — the exposure

ISO, shutter, aperture and focal length, in that order, and an exposure compensation only when one was set. A file carrying no exposure data reads its dimensions, megapixels and size instead, so the line is never empty.

Level 2 — the file

A smaller, dimmer block above it: camera and lens, then dimensions, megapixels, file size, the date it was taken, and the current zoom.

Level 3 — where you were standing

A framed map ribbon on top, offered only for photographs that carry a location. Clicking it opens Maps at the same spot. Photographs without one skip this level entirely — you are never shown a map you didn’t ask for.

The level is sticky. Changing photographs, closing the viewer and relaunching the application all leave it where you set it; only you move it. The button in the window bar is a plain on and off over whichever level you last chose.

The map is the one part of Baryta that reaches beyond your own network: drawing it requests map tiles from Apple, the same as any application using the system’s Maps framework. The privacy policy says so plainly.

The slideshow

⌘⏎ starts one, and so does the play button between the bar’s arrows. A show is the viewer with a clock — the same surface, the same framing — so starting one is not a new screen arriving but the photograph you are already looking at beginning to move. Any inspection zoom eases back down to the photograph’s own framing first.

It plays the current folder, in the listing as it stood when you pressed start, beginning at the photograph that is up. It does not wander into subfolders. Photographs that vanish mid-show are skipped rather than mourned.

The clock is driven by the pixels, not by a timer: the dwell begins when the photograph is confirmed on screen, so a slow share never spends a photograph’s time on an empty frame. Seconds per photo means seconds at rest — a transition’s own time rides on top.

While it runs, Space pauses and resumes, Esc ends it, and the arrow keys step manually along the show’s own order — which matters when the order is shuffled. I still cycles the information readout, live, which is why there is no setting for it: what you see is what the show keeps. Zoom, panning and the navigator stand down for the duration; a drag still moves the window. The display is kept awake, and Baryta never claims the audio session, so whatever you already had playing keeps playing underneath.

The bar can be summoned mid-show by clicking or with T, and then one rule governs everything on it: touching any viewer control ends the show and does the thing, in one click. A framing preset ends it and lands there; the back chevron ends it and returns to the grid. The two exceptions are the transport, which is the show’s own remote, and the information button, which is the same instrument as the live I key.

Ending a show leaves the viewer standing on the photograph it reached, one Esc from the grid. Duration, transition, order and repeat all live in Settings → Slideshow, and are read when a show starts, so a change lands on the next one.

Keyboard reference

Baryta is built to be driven from the keyboard, and the same key means the obvious thing for wherever you are: Space opens a photograph in the grid and pauses a slideshow inside one.

The Photo and Slideshow menus in the menu bar carry these same commands, and are the place to look when a key escapes you. Nothing in them is a second way in — each item presses the same key you would have.

Mouse and trackpad

Stepping through photographs with the keyboard hides the pointer until you actually move the mouse, so it never sits over a photograph you are studying.

Settings

⌘, opens them. Nothing has an Apply button: every setting is read where it is used, so a change takes effect as you make it. The window remembers which tab you left it on.

General

Resume at launch

Nothing — start clean connects your sources and stops there. Folder and selection brings back the tree as you left it, with the folder you were in. Exact view — the default — brings back everything the window was showing, including an open photograph and its information level. The view is written continuously, so it survives a crash as well as a quit. A restored photograph always opens at its default framing rather than the zoom you left on it; arriving cold at 1:1 on a sixty-megapixel file reads as jarring rather than faithful.

Show filenames in the grid

On by default. Off gives a lattice of nothing but photographs.

Viewer

Open photos at

Automatic, Fit or Fill. Automatic — the default — fills the window when doing so hides little of the photograph, and fits otherwise.

Keep zoom across photos

On by default. Carries an inspection zoom, and its position, to the next photograph for A/B sharpness comparisons. Only zooms closer than Fill ride along.

Slideshow

Show each photo for

2, 3, 5, 10 or 30 seconds. Five by default, and it means seconds at rest.

Transition

Replace is a cut. Crossfade dissolves one photograph into the next. Fade Through passes through black in dark mode and white in light.

Transition duration

Fast, Normal or Slow. Disabled for Replace, since a cut has no duration.

Play order

In order, or shuffle. Shuffle still opens on the photograph you started from and randomises the rest, and never repeats a photograph across the seam when a show loops.

Repeat play

Off by default. On, the show begins again at the folder’s end.

Cache

Baryta keeps no catalog and no thumbnail database. What it does keep is a short-lived spill of recently fetched bytes in the system’s Caches folder, so sessions close together in time start warm. macOS may purge it whenever it likes, and nothing is lost when it does.

Keep cached files for

One day, three days, a week, two weeks or a month — the default. Shortening it prunes immediately.

Cached data, and Clear Cache

What the spill currently occupies, and a button to empty it. Clearing touches nothing on your server and loses no settings.

About

The version, and the way to reach it: About Baryta in the application menu opens Settings on this tab rather than a separate panel. One window, and the version reads as a setting’s neighbour.

What it will show

Baryta never decodes an image itself. It hands the bytes to macOS and shows what comes back, which means the supported formats are exactly the ones your version of macOS supports — JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, GIF and WebP among them, with newer formats arriving as the system learns them. Nothing is transcoded, ever. A file the system cannot decode is not shown as broken; it simply isn’t listed.

Three deliberate exclusions:

RAW files, though macOS could decode them

There is no neutral rendering of a raw file, only somebody’s recipe. A generic one would show you a worse photograph than the one already in your editor. So raw files are treated as unsupported — not even the preview the camera embedded — and a folder holding only raw files is genuinely empty to Baryta. Its sibling, the folder of exported JPEGs, is what this is for.

Video

Baryta is a photo browser.

The housekeeping

Dot-files and the service folders NAS boxes leave lying around — @eaDir, #recycle, #snapshot, $RECYCLE.BIN and their relatives — are kept out of the tree, so what you see is the folders you made.

When something looks wrong

Messages in the grid

No photos here

This folder has no images the system can decode. Usually raw files, video, or a folder of subfolders. The photographs are probably one level down.

Can’t read this folder

The server answered, but not with a listing. The message underneath is the server’s own words. Most often it is a permissions matter on the NAS: confirm the account you connected with can read that folder.

Can’t open this photo

Either the file went away, or the system could not decode this file — a truncated or damaged image, or one whose extension does not match its contents.

When a source goes quiet

Baryta assumes the best for as long as it can. A share that stops answering is usually a session that died on wake, and it heals on the first retry, so the early seconds are deliberately silent — announcing a catastrophe that then undoes itself is worse than saying nothing. It keeps showing you everything it can still paint from what it already holds.

Only when it runs out of photographs it can show and the retries have gone on long enough does the grid go still behind a veil. The sidebar and the file pane stay live beside it, because another source may be perfectly healthy and the way to it must never be behind a wall.

Reconnecting source

Your photos will return when the connection does. Nothing to do. Retries continue on their own, and the veil lifts once a real directory listing succeeds and stays succeeding.

Unable to reconnect

Check your connection and try again. The retries have given up. Try Again, or Return, forces a fresh attempt. Worth checking: that the NAS is awake, and that the Mac is on the network you think it is.

Credentials rejected

The server refused the name and password it had. Because there is no edit screen, the remedy is to disconnect that server in the sidebar and add it again. This is also what you will see if the password was never saved to the Keychain — the next launch has nothing to offer the server.

Volume unavailable

A local disk or card was ejected. There are no retries here, because the system reports the fact exactly; plugging it back in returns your photographs.

Nothing appears when adding a server

Discovery depends on permission macOS grants per application. Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network and confirm Baryta is allowed. If it is, and the NAS still does not appear, it may simply not advertise itself — use By Address, which does not depend on discovery at all.

Still stuck

Write, and a person answers — the same person who wrote the code. The support page lists what to include in a report, which matters most for connection trouble: Baryta’s SMB client is written from scratch rather than borrowed, and a NAS it has not met before is the likeliest thing to be wrong.