Workshop on XnView

[GeorgD]

Hello XnView-Users!

I am planning to hold a workshop on XnView at my university next thursday, as I saw a lot of people struggling with the windows build-in tool or some lame old (and sometimes cracked ) version of ACDSee, forcing them to loose image quality when rotating JPGs, rename image for image (no batch), and do other bugging things. I think most of those people just don't know of XnView or are frightened by the power of XnView ("sooo many features - I'll never understand that!"). As I really appreciate XnView and think I'm relatively savvy in it, I hope I can help them and may promote XnView at the same time. So much for my motivation

So, what's the content I thought of? I'll use 1.90beta2 as it is already stable enough and contains really great improvements First, a general introduction to the view options (full screen, rotation, slide show etc) followed by file management (mass rename, categories, tagging, etc pp) and finally some basic image editing (contrast, brightness, color saturation, sepia, color correction, sharpen etc). I plan to spend 3 hours, including some hands-on trying by the audience.

Now my questions:
1) Does any workshop material exist?

2) Is here anyone who wants to reuse the workshop material? The material may be in English or in German; I'm fluent in both and the students shall understand both, so it does not really matter. I'm still not sure what I'll choose - English may be reused by a larger amount of people (and makes sense as 1.9beta2 is UK only), but German will be easier for the audience (most of them are native German speakers). Thoughts?

3) Anyone who wants to help me with the slides? So creating them, reviewing the wording, example pics,...? And in case anyone wants to come to Germany, Bamberg, Feldkirchenstr. 21, N49°54'28.6'' E010°54'16.4'' on Thursday 2006-12-07 at 18:00 in order to support the workshop: Welcome

4) Please write (in the briefest way you can please!! I'm doing this in my limited leisure time ) what you do most often with XnView and what you love most about it. Please do not post what I already have as content - those of you that understand German may have a look at the announcement and as soon as I've some slides, I'll edit this post and add the slides' URL, so you will be able to see what content I already have.

Well, I think this explains why I crawled the whole day in the forums over here...and I got some really nice inspirations so already: Thank you, XnView-forum-community!

/Georg

[helmut]

Thank you very much for holding a workshop at your university and thinking about workshop material, Georg. Making XnView more public is surely appreciated.

As you probably know, there's the XnView Online help which explains a number of things. For newbies the difference between the browser, view mode and fullscreen mode is important to know. Once this is clear, you can dive into other details.

My personal main usage is browsing folders and moving/copying images. So it might be a good idea to show how multiple images can be selected and how they can be moved/copied (using dialogs "Move to" and "Copy to" or by Drag & Drop).

And some basic image editing is useful, too: Colour correction, Red eye correction, and cropping using fixed selection ratios. The latter is important if you want to avoid your paper prints to have different sizes.

An English presentation would be surely good for further usage, but if I were you I'd hold the presentation in the language most students know. If needed and wanted, someone could translate the German workshop material to English or any other language needed.

Workshop for a free program:
Currently, your workshop title and description is pretty general and does not mention which software is actually used. I guess people interested in the workshop should know which software they will learn about. I suggest to mention "XnView" somewhere in the workshop description.

Apart from this post, I offer you to have a phone call for questions or a general talk about XnView. Also I could have a look at your workshop material. I cannot promise much since I'm very busy with my daily job.

Just contact me via personal mail if you are interested in some support from my side (sure enough in German).

Grüße, Helmut

[GeorgD]

Helmut, thank you for your usage description, suggestions and offers I never thought of wanting a constant paper layout for all fotos, but I know people who want it (for albums etc). THX!

I'll incorporate the help in some way (I guess mainly refer to it "for more details"). And I intentionally did not mention XnView in the description, as then people might not come to the workshop as XnView seems to be very easy to explore by try & error (in contrast to Salamander, the other workshop) but later gets quite complex (combinations of advanced features and all the options) and thus might frustrate several newbies. I prefer slightly less but happy users as they spread the word And be assured: The slides will be public, so after the workshop, everyone can see what program is used Concerning EN/DE, we'll see tomorrow as after the long hike of today I'm not in the mood for decisions.

/Georg

[helmut]

Starting with a simple workshop is a good idea. If you start too complicated, it's hard to make things easier when you find out. But vice versa (simple to more complicated) is easy and can be done simply by increasing the speed.

Normally it's good to be international and use English. But as written before I think you should go for the German version. The workshop is about learning about a graphic viewer, not about learning English.

Good luck with your workshop - I'd be interested to know how you go with it.

Regards, Helmut

[GeorgD]

Sorry fo the long delay -- I started to work and had to finish my thesis at the same time... The workshop was in a small group, in a good atmosphere, and the participants were asking when other workshops will follow - so it can't have been that bad As it was only a small group, I did not produce a big bunch of slides but a list of topics and hints. Then, all together had a look at this and tried out some functions with example images. In case anyone is interested in the material, just drop me a message

Best regards, Georg