Well, I got to use a copy of the "X" program. We are still not quite sure what we going to use. And I must say that "keywords" are the key in an image organizer. Categories are nice but keywords with "smart albums" make the deal. I have seen somebody post topics about keywords and they go into detail about it so I am sure that you are familiar about it. I found it nice to have the program look in a specific directory (this specific one does that but you can have it scan all or... not sure how that would work) and find all keywords in images and displays them on the left as folders so when you click on the keyword "skull" it would show all pictures that contain that keyword. You can write a keyword for multiple pictures at once buy selecting pictures and writing a word in "add/remove keywords". You can also select a keyword from a list of already existing ones. It will not change the original IPTC keyword info of the image but you do have an option to write to the the image latter on. A filter can be applied and you can specify to show images that contain all included keywords such as "human" and "scull" and it would show you those that have both words in them. That is good if you quickly want to find a specific picture of a certain texture or a body part let say "old+man+white+age+70+arm"...
That would be nice to have.
I found that in mentioned program above I have to reorganize images in categories and when you have 80,000+ images then that becomes a pain. It is nice that it creates thumbnails in one big file and an index file where all keywords and other data is stored so if you decide to move the folder all that stuff goes with it. It is somehow (I do not understand how) connected to windows explorer so if you rename an image it will know so you do not loose keywords for that image. Another problem was that was not meant for network use with multiple users using it at the same time. If I make a change and save, the next user will overwrite my changes when he exits the program.
So I can give up the categories (I like exploring through my folders I created manually) but oh man do those keywords help.
As I said xnview is the greatest image explorer and I would like to be able to see it little better so we can have use of it in production.
Thanks
DC
Here is the smart folder with keywords sample off of my local drive:
