What the .litria folder is for: catalog backups
The one thing Litria writes into your folders is a .litria folder of catalog backups: what one holds, how often it is written and how to restore it.
Litria reads your photos where they are and never moves, renames or overwrites them. Add a folder, though, and a .litria folder appears inside it. This post says what is in it, what is not, and how to use it when you need it.
What a backup holds
Litria keeps a catalog of your library on your device: which folders you added, which photos are in them, and what you have told Litria about each one. The .litria folder holds backups of that catalog, called snapshots.
A snapshot holds:
- the folders you added and the folders inside them,
- each photo's file name and where it sits, its size, its capture date, and its camera and lens,
- your ratings, and which photos you kept or rejected,
- your albums: their names, their covers, which photos are in each and in what order.
Each snapshot is a single file, named for the time it was written.
What a backup does not hold
A snapshot holds no photos. Nor does it hold your edits, their history, your presets or your masks. Those are kept in your browser's storage on the device, or in the desktop app's own storage, and nowhere else.
So a snapshot brings back your ratings, flags and albums, and the edits stay wherever you made them. Keep your own backups of your photo files. Litria is not a backup of them.
How often Litria writes one
Litria writes an automatic snapshot at most once a day, when you open the library, Recents or Settings, or after it has finished reading a folder. It skips a day when your catalog is empty.
In each folder, it keeps the last 7 daily snapshots and 4 weekly ones, and removes older automatic snapshots. Snapshots you ask for are never removed automatically.
To write one now, open Settings, then Storage & backup, and choose Back up now.
An extra copy
Your library folders are often on the same disk as each other. Under Catalog backup in Settings, Extra copy lets you pick one more folder, on another drive for instance, and Litria writes its snapshots there too.
Restore a snapshot
- Open Settings, then Storage & backup.
- Under Restore, find the snapshot you want. Each one says when it was written.
- Choose Restore, then Restore this snapshot.
A restore replaces the catalog you have now with the snapshot. Before it does, Litria writes a safety copy of the current catalog, so you can go back if you picked the wrong one. Your photo files are not touched either way.
Litria lists the snapshots of the folders it knows about in this browser. If you open Litria somewhere new, such as another browser, add the same folder first, and its snapshots appear under Restore.
The rest of Storage & backup
Under Derived cache, Litria also keeps thumbnails and developed copies of your photos so they reopen quickly. Clear derived data removes them to free space. Your catalog, edits, history, ratings, flags, albums and backups all stay, and Litria rebuilds the thumbnails as you need them.
Open Litria
Open Litria in Chrome or Edge, or download the desktop app. Add a folder, then open Settings and look under Storage & backup.