for both setting and searching.
There are two "types" of categories:
(A) as keyword (freely chosen)
(B) as structuring element (that's what I would call a category).
Semantically associated as partitions, hierarchies (multi-) inheritence, net etc.
(A) is easy & comfy to use for both searching and setting.
But in general it won't by coherent; you'll never know if you have "the right" tags etc.
(B) You have to think before setting and also for searching.
But using a structure you have lot of advantages.
For my circumstances I need (B).
The (unfortunately only single) inheritence (vertical).
And the "category sets" (horizontal).
An example:
A have categories for time (1910ies, 1920ies, ...),
for place (England, Manchester, Oslo, cellar, ...),
for theme (society, health, history, math, ...),
for characterization (humor, absurd, sad, ...) etc.
All-in-all I have about 200+ categories,
and about 10 "hyper categories" ("time", "place", "theme" etc.),
the latter as "category sets".
Without the "hyper categories"/ "category sets"
it wouldn't be reasonable to handle 200+ categories.
With them it's quite straigt forward when setting and searching:
I have a look at the 10 categories one by one.
Coherence is quite easy to ensure that way.
There is just ONE THING I miss:
When searching/ filtering by category (using the overview of category sets of course),
up to now I cannot filter IN the category set panel,
but when having identified a needed category in the category sets
I have to go to the filter pane and scroll and find the category I get from sets.
Sometimes I forget and click IN the category sets box,
and the malheur (setting) is done.
So my question if XnViewMP could assist in my "structured categorizing"?
An idea would be to have a check box in the category set panel,
to switch between setting and searching...(?).
BTW: I it was for me I wouldn't need the category filter panel at all.
All categories would be in categories set (default: "No set").
This would make things a lot easier, and the need to manually ensure
that every category is at least in one set... would not be needed.
That would be great (and I think you should think that too
)