Documentation

This is all of it. Four screens: New, Library, Learn, Setup.

Setup

Sieve reads one source at a time: an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic catalog, or a folder of originals with everything under it. Both are read only.

It reads file names, capture dates, camera and lens, and the stars and rejects already in the catalog or in XMP sidecars beside the files. Its own renders, measurements and models live in its own folder, not in yours.

It writes nothing to your catalog and nothing inside a photograph, ever. Turn on writing in Setup and it writes your stars to an .xmp sidecar beside the original, and nowhere else. Change the source from Setup, under Change.

Marks

The marks are yours. Sieve never sets one for you.

1 to 5 set stars. 0 clears them. Z picks. X rejects. U removes a pick or reject. Backspace undoes the last mark.

With the plug-in installed, every mark reaches Lightroom Classic on its own, usually within a second. There is nothing to press and nothing to sync.

For everything else, turn on sidecar writing and a star lands in an .xmp file beside the original. Capture One picks it up with Full Sync on, Bridge and Photo Mechanic read it directly, darktable reads it once at startup and then prefers its own database.

Picks and rejects do not travel through sidecars. Lightroom Classic keeps its flags out of XMP entirely, so there is no field in the file to put them in. They stay in Sieve, where they still count as labels, and the plug-in carries them into Classic.

Picks

A pick is a frame Sieve believes you would star, taken from the top of its score for that set. It is a proposal, never a star. No score number is shown: a proposed star was measured to be wrong by more than a star on average, so showing one would be theater.

The explanation is your own work. Open a frame and Nearest rated frames shows the five frames you already rated that sit closest to it.

Below about 300 rated frames Sieve uses a generic model and says so on the screen. There is nothing personal to learn yet.

New

New lists the sets that have arrived since the last pick or learn. Press Pick on a row and the picks land in it. Look through opens that set in Library. With Lightroom Classic connected, the picks also appear there as a collection named after the set.

Learn

Learn fits a new model on every mark you have made. It is never automatic.

The checklist is by set. Untick the sets you never went through. In a ticked set, every unmarked frame counts as a zero-star frame, so ticking a shoot you only half looked at teaches Sieve that your best unseen work is worthless.

When it finishes it reports either Kept the new model or Kept the previous model, with a paired forward score and its interval. Kept the previous model means the new fit could not show it beats the one you already have, so nothing changed. That is a normal answer and not a failure. It usually means few marks have moved since the last run.

Troubleshooting

• Nothing new. New lists only sets that arrived since the last run. Any set can still be opened from the rail in Library.
• The plug-in is not seen. Add it under File, Plug-in Manager, Add, then check Sieve itself is open. The plug-in talks to the app, so the app has to be running.
• Marks are not written. Sidecar writing is off by default and is set per library. When a write is refused, the mark says so and gives the reason.
• A set shows No frames could be read. The originals moved, were renamed, or sit on a volume that is not mounted. Reconnect the drive, or point Sieve at where the files are now.
• The app asks for folder access. macOS asks once for each location outside your own folders. Sieve only reads there. Decline and that folder stays invisible, which breaks nothing else.