Loading the pictures
The pictures are loaded in the background.
While loading goes on, you can already work with the pictures that are displayed.
Exception: some of the functions like sorting chronologically are not available before all pictures are loaded.
The loading can be aborted via the program menu (End).
 
Usage
All functions can be called by context menus:
Right-click on the background of the lighttable: Program menu
Right-click on a frame or on a picure: Picture menu

Shortcuts
For all tasks there are shortcuts as shown in the context menus:
Ctrl+A Sort pictures alphabetically
Ctrl+C Sort pictures chronologically
Ctrl+S Sildeshow, beginning with the marked picture
Ctrl+N Rename all pictures
Ctrl+T Time correction
F1 Help
Ctrl+End Quit program
Drag a frame with the mouse: you can move the frame to any position on the lighttable
Enter or click on a picture: Enlarge picture
Alt+Enter or click on an enlarged picture: Fullscreen view
Right → Move to next picture
Left   ← Move to previous picture
I Picture informations
N Rename picture
Del Delete picture
ESC will close and cancel everything

View and compare pictures
When view or fullscreen view is open, just move with the keys → ← through the photos (big files take a moment to load).
Or jump to another picture: click "down" on another picture. You can also scroll the "table".

Sort pictures
If you have pictures of more than one camera, it is useful to first sort them chronologically (Program menu). This function reads the Exif-metadata of the photographs.
To sort manually, just  move the frames around on the table. Then you can rename them manually like "005 my best picture".

Rename all pictures (Ctrl+N)
A good alternative to renaming manually. If you have moved all photographs to the desired places, the files can be numbered and renamed exactly in this order. As you like, the old filenames are either attatched or overwritten.

Time correction (Ctrl+T)
When geotagging your photographs or when comparing photos of two cameras, you notice that a camera had a wrong time? No problem. With this function you can correct the Exif-metadata of date and time of all the photographs in the folder.

Note: Image manipulation and thumbnails
When editing photographs with an image manipulation program (i.e. GIMP), the thumbnail pictures of the photos are not changed. So, Lighttable will still show the old miniature pictures before the changes. Solution:
a) go to preview in Gwenview, Dolphin, Konqueror or any similar program, so the thumbnails are updated,
b) delete all the thumbnails (in the folder /home/user/.thumbnails/normal), so they will be newly created afterwards.