The Gallery

Some pages you can name. Others you can only picture. You know there was something about a clinic in Lisbon, or a diagram with three overlapping circles, or that long article you clipped on a Sunday — but not what you called it, and searching only works when you can guess a word that’s actually in it. The Gallery is for those. It turns every page into a card you can read, and lets you flip through them without losing your place.

It is a lens, not a view. Nothing is created, named, or saved when you open it, and there is nothing to tidy up afterwards. Close it and it’s gone.

Two ways in

• The Gallery tool — every page in the document, as one wall. Press it again to leave. (If it isn’t on your toolbar, drag it there from Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Toolbar.)
• A folder’s ▦ — hover any folder in the page list and a small grid icon appears at its right. That folder’s pages, as a wall, with the folder’s name at the top. It shows the pages that folder itself holds — a subfolder has its own ▦, so you go down the tree the way you’d expect rather than getting a top-level folder’s entire subtree in one dump. A folder holding nothing but subfolders has no wall of its own, so it shows no icon.

What a card shows

Each card carries the page’s icon and name, its cover image when it has one, a real slice of what is actually written on the page, and its key values as small chips. The text matters: a card showing the first real sentences is what lets you recognise a page you can’t name. Pages that aren’t prose say what they are instead — a canvas reports how many cards and frames it holds, a file says what kind of file it is.

Reading without leaving the wall

Click any card and the page opens over the wall, at full reading size. This is the part that makes the Gallery useful rather than pretty: the wall stays behind it, so you can look at a page, decide, and move on without navigating away and having to find your place again.

• ← and →, or the ‹ › buttons, walk to the next and previous card. The counter shows where you are in the wall.
• Esc, the ✕ Close button, or a click on the dimmed background closes it and leaves the wall exactly as it was.
• Open page leaves the Gallery and opens that page properly, for editing.

So the rhythm is: open a card, glance, →, glance, → — and Open page only when you’ve found the one you actually wanted.

Files open as files

A card for a PDF, an ePub, a saved web article, or an image doesn’t show you a note about the file — it opens the file itself, in the same readers the page uses:

• PDFs get page position and paging controls, and zoom, in a small bar at the bottom of the peek.
• ePubs reflow, so instead of page numbers they get text size.
• Both carry a button to hand the file to your system viewer, for anything the peek doesn’t do.

This is what makes a wall of clippings genuinely browsable — you can read enough of a saved article to decide its fate without opening it as a page at all.

Four things people use it for

• Triage what you never filed. Open the Gallery, walk the wall with →, and use Open page on the few that need filing. Clippings and quick captures accumulate faster than anyone files them; this is the cheapest way to work through a month of them.
• The reading pile. Give your unread material a folder and use its ▦. Each PDF and ePub opens far enough to remind you what it is and whether you still care — a decision you cannot make from a list of filenames.
• Find the page you can only picture. When search fails because you can’t guess the words, the wall lets you recognise it instead: covers, shapes, and first sentences do the work your memory was going to do anyway.
• Re-read a folder you’ve neglected. Old research folders go stale quietly. A folder’s wall shows you, in one screen, what is actually in there — usually including two or three things you’d completely forgotten writing.

The Gallery and Database Views

The Gallery is the same card wall that Database Views can draw, with the setup removed: no filters to build, no view to name, no shaping to maintain. Reach for the Gallery when you want to look through your pages right now. Reach for a database view’s Gallery layout when the wall is one you want to come back to — a filtered, sorted, grouped wall that stays put, like “books, grouped by status”.

Tips

• The peek is for reading, not editing. Anything you want to change is one Open page away, so nothing is ever half-edited in a preview.
• The Gallery tool toggles: the same press that opened the wall closes it.
• A folder’s wall follows the folder. File a page into it and it appears there next time — nothing to refresh or rebuild.