Strategy regarding portablilty and tagging

[Bury]

Hello there!

I'm trying XnViewMP again to organize and tag my files. My main problem is, that I have to computers (one at work and one at home) and one main storage of my shooted and collected photos. This storage is a self-hosted nextcloud server. Additionally (this may be interesting for the setup), I always have my usb thumb drive with my portable apps mounted at the computer I currently working on. So there could be the starting point for installing and starting XnView.

But how do I configure it for best portability. As my Nextcloud syncs to the filesystem, these paths may be different (e.g. at work: D:\Nextcloud\Photos\ | Home: C:\Users\[Username]\Nextcloud\Phots). The way I understand the "base path" option, I can't use an USB-Thumb Drive installation of XnView with these paths, can I? If I could, what and how should I configure XnViewMP?

The next question is: I write tags and categories back to the files. Even if I would loose the XnView database, I easyly could recreate the database from the file-metadata, right? And the same way, I could have two completely different installations (one at home, one at work) with the same datasource (nextcloud) but I would have to update catalogue from files at every startup of XnView, right?

Hint: I could also map the nextcloud to a networkdrive (e.g. V:\) via webdav. So the paths would nearly stay always the same. But I wouldn't rely on this. But this could be a workaround....

What would your strategies be? Thanks in advance!

[Bury]

Hello. I didn't make any progress on this question. So if anybody of you have an idea, I would be happy. thx.

[xnview]

But how do I configure it for best portability. As my Nextcloud syncs to the filesystem, these paths may be different (e.g. at work: D:\Nextcloud\Photos\ | Home: C:\Users\[Username]\Nextcloud\Phots). The way I understand the "base path" option, I can't use an USB-Thumb Drive installation of XnView with these paths, can I? If I could, what and how should I configure XnViewMP?

'base path' is to use relative path instead of absolute path. So you can use D:\Nextcloud\ & C:\Users\[Username]\Nextcloud as 'base path'
But be careful, you need to configure it before to use catalog

The next question is: I write tags and categories back to the files. Even if I would loose the XnView database, I easyly could recreate the database from the file-metadata, right?

If you have configured to write tags in the file itself, yes

And the same way, I could have two completely different installations (one at home, one at work) with the same datasource (nextcloud) but I would have to update catalogue from files at every startup of XnView, right?

yes if you don't use 'base path'

Hint: I could also map the nextcloud to a networkdrive (e.g. V:\) via webdav. So the paths would nearly stay always the same. But I wouldn't rely on this. But this could be a workaround....

What would your strategies be? Thanks in advance!

It's perhaps better to have the same drive on all computers, and not to use 'base path'...