Cropping and straightening photos in Disk Sort by Zaweba
Press E in Disk Sort by Zaweba's large view to crop with aspect presets, straighten, turn and adjust brightness, contrast and warmth, non-destructively.
Quick photo fixes happen right where you sort in Disk Sort by Zaweba. Press E in the large picture view and the editor opens: crop with aspect presets or a ratio of your own, straighten with a slider, turn left or right, and adjust brightness, contrast and warmth, with Auto-level for a quick start. The originals are never modified. Edits are stored beside the photo and only applied when you export.
Cropping
Crop has aspect presets for common shapes and a custom ratio, such as 5:7, for anything else. A Portrait shape toggle swaps the ratio for upright pictures, so a print shape works whichever way the photo was taken.
Choose the shape for where the picture is going. A print needs the print's ratio, or the shop will crop it for you. A picture for a screen suits a wide shape. A square suits a profile picture.
Crop to improve the picture, not just to fit it. Trim the empty sky above a group, the edge of a car that wandered into frame, or the bright window that pulls the eye away from a face.
Straightening
Drag the straighten slider until the horizon, a door frame or a wall is level. Double-click the slider to go back to 0. A sea horizon that leans by a degree or two looks wrong to everyone even if they can't say why, so this small fix makes a big difference.
Straighten before you settle the crop, because turning the picture changes what fits inside the frame.
Turning
Use [ and ] to turn a photo left or right. Photos are already shown the right way up from the camera's orientation note, so this is for the odd picture that the camera got wrong, or a scan of a print that went in sideways.
Brightness, contrast and warmth
Three sliders cover the everyday adjustments. Brightness lifts or darkens the whole picture. Contrast widens or narrows the gap between darks and lights. Warmth shifts colour towards orange or blue, which fixes indoor shots that came out too yellow and beach shots that look cold.
Auto-level is a good first step. It sets the picture's levels for you, and you can fine tune from there with the sliders.
Reset to original clears every edit if you want to start again.
Why it's safe
Editing in a sorting tool could be risky, but Disk Sort keeps originals untouched. The edits are stored beside the photo, so the camera file stays exactly as it was. When you want edited copies, Ctrl+E exports the tagged or selected photos with the edits applied as new files.
That means you can crop a photo for a print today and crop it differently for a screen next month, starting from the full original each time.
Fitting edits into a cull
The editor sits in the large view because that's where you judge pictures. A smooth routine: flick through a shoot, mark keepers with P and rate them 1 to 5, zoom to compare sharpness between similar shots, then go back through the keepers and press E on any that need a straighter horizon or a better crop. Filter the list to keepers so you only see those. Finally tag them and export.
For bigger changes, such as removing an object or retouching skin, an image editor is the right tool, and Open with lists installed Zaweba apps that edit the file, such as Paint. For the common fixes that most holiday and family photos need, Disk Sort by Zaweba's editor is quicker because it's already open.
