XnView Software

Save - Options - has no accelerator key :)

* It would be good if say Alt-O could open the options

-- Usually one has to open options to double-check what you are saving as so this would be helpful, I actually think Irfanview does quite well by opening the options automatically beside the save ...

I don't have any choice... the other workaround is copying the folders of interest to a RAM drive but it's not as good as selecting folders. I also use voidtools Everything that allows multiselection but the thumbnailing is not as effective as xnview.
I think it basically needs to be realised that ...

Folders is definitely the right approach for the task, and a database the incorrect one. They are stored in a genetic (taxonomical) tree and within the final folder nodes by locational area or where needed by individual plant.
We're talking about categorisation that's utilised on the fly and ...

Creating criteria as you suggest doesn't work well with needing the task a lot.
The reason I myself need it a lot isn't an artifact of bad foldering, but rather because I have a lot of plant photos and I often study some aspect. For example if I want to look at the hairier forms of plant, or items ...

As per stew11, any jpg seems to suffer from slow lossless crop.

sample tiny file attached, which is very slow to do a lossless crop within (tested just now on 1.9.8 )

Well it's just that I can easily need it myself innumerable times a day in different combinations, so I wouldn't want to be assigning anything, just clicking on multiple folders as needed. I'm sure others will need to do similarly at different times.
I wouldn't envisage that there should be a ...

In the folder tree it would be very helpful if you could select more than one folder (ctrl-click) and the files shown are from the selected folders. Subfolders view would show the subfolder items from all of them.

David

If you drag a square selection into the window edges, the window scrolls when the cursor meets the edge, but not the left edge specifically when maximised (it does when non-maximised). Also the scrolls are performed at different speeds depending on the edge.
* Dragging the selection to the left edge ...

I'm glad it's not just me!
In fact, even a tiny JPG of a mere 30K in size takes a long time to crop (not much different from a 7 Mb one) so it's presumably not caused by inadvertently decoding the picture or something (I did check the crop was also lossless using 1200 x 1200 based on 0,0 and it does ...

When I losslessly crop a jpeg, the jpegcrop.exe tool is very fast (though its interface is clunky). By contrast, xnview is unexpectedly slow, even on ideal boundaries, although I reckon it used to be much faster.
I wonder if there's any way to improve this as you feel the speed difference, or is ...

1.9.6 now works for me

In addition this related cropping bug is now fixed for me - viewtopic.php?p=209914

Works now!

Works for me now!