THUMBNAILS - rebuild link, rate and view content as on original

[Giacomo Marchèt]

Hello everyone, Hello Pierre,
I'm cataloging 16 thousand jpg images. The first step I concluded was to assign a star rating to some photos (plus 2000 in total). Unfortunately in the settings / metadata / IPTC & XMP both in KEYWORDS and in EVALUATION & LABEL many items did NOT have the active check with V, therefore no data was recorded in the original image file. (It would be useful if all these items were enabled at the time of installation ...) Now I understand the mistake, I checked all the items and actually in the test files that I tested in a classic windows 7 folder, both the ratings (stars) and the tags appear.

Now, normally when making the selection under FILTER OF CATEGORIES I select the 5 EXCELLENT stars, I see the thumbnail of that image and by clicking on it I can open it normally; even in the original image the rating (star) attributed is still visible, a sign that the thumbnail and the file are well connected.

The problem happens to me with over 2000 images that I had already rated with another evaluation star and that appear to me without any image in the preview and without any evaluation in the original file ... they are lost ???!!! But since the thumbnail file names refer to real file names in the source folder - without having to do it all over again - I can somehow recreate the right links between thumbnail and original file by displaying the same content as the original file in the thumbnail ? And in the same way allowing me, also for the future, to carry out all those operations (copy, paste, move, delete, etc.) directly from the filter from the CATEGORY FILTER?
Last: if I reinstall xnviewMP risk of losing 2000 rating attribution?

Waiting for an answer, thank you in advance.

[michel038]

Hello Giacomo
To avoid losing your work, you can first save a copy of the xnview.db file (when XnviewMP is stopped.)
You can also use File's categories > Export (with ratings and labels options enabled)
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export_cat.png (6.4 KiB) Viewed 695 times

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You will get an xml file that can be imported later into a new XnViewMP installation.

You may be able to correct this XML file with a powerful text editor (Notepad ++ ?) if you find errors in it, for example files that have been moved, or folders that have been renamed.
Perhaps a "search and replace" in the xml file can solve the problem ...
And then, import it.

[michel038]

For your last (long) question, I did not understand well:
A photo rated with x stars (even with export options not validated) should be correctly handled in the catalog and category filter ...

It would then be possible to cause the export on one or more selected photos,(export options enabled), with the menu > View > Update files from catalog