XnView Software

I've installed Honeyview just for this feature - right click > browse zip content. It could be nice to see it integrated in XnViewMP.

I use Imagine - Image & Animation Viewer for Windows / by Chun Sejin. It can open and browse .zip and .rar files, plus lots of others. Its pretty close to Universal Viewer with all it can view.

There are a ton of image viewers out there, and what you like is mostly a matter of personal taste, but if this were a feature available for XNview I would absolutely recommend it to anyone — and particularly to non-Windows users (since there are actually quite a number of Windows viewers that already do this) … as it is it’s just lost in the crowd …

I have XnView installed alongside ACDSEE and I use it for everything else because it is just better. But I still can't get rid of ACDSEE without this feature integrated into XnView.

osiris2258 wrote:I have XnView installed alongside ACDSEE and I use it for everything else because it is just better. But I still can't get rid of ACDSEE without this feature integrated into XnView.

... I think, the problem to work with a compressed file (zip, rar,etc file) with a lot of data/jpg, is if your zip file is corrupted, all your jpg/data can be lost. (for me it is only interesting for backup, or for the ability to copy to an other media, or eventually, an user friendly way to viewonly/browse into a backup (but consumes a lot of CPU, mem, etc...)) ... but not for a "normal" use.

As previously stated, zip and rar ( sometimes under the extensions cbz and cbr, but the actual format isn't different) are the most common means of distributing large sets of image files such as comics, scanned documents, and large sets of photographs. Support for viewing these files as if they were regular folders is absolutely both useful and necessary to a large number of users.

oops66 wrote:... I think, the problem to work with a compressed file (zip, rar,etc file) with a lot of data/jpg, is if your zip file is corrupted, all your jpg/data can be lost. (for me it is only interesting for backup, or for the ability to copy to an other media, or eventually, an user friendly way to viewonly/browse into a backup (but consumes a lot of CPU, mem, etc...)) ... but not for a "normal" use.

That’s completely inaccurate — TARballs and others used with a “store” option are essentially no different from actual folders and no more susceptible to corruption, while those that use compression have error correcting schemes in place to fix such issues — these days many applications RUN directly out of zip files (.jar anyone? that’s not the only case, though perhaps the most extreme) and are no more in danger of self-destructing than .exe executables.

... Of course the integrity/security is much better than in the past , and fortunatly , and even for compressed files... but this kind of practice/behavior consumes a lot of CPU and energy ... so it is not so good for the planet. And in an other hand , compressing and decompressing each time, a very big file for only few MB used is not efficient., just more user friendly

As invisifan said tarballs are legit ways to store groups. Zip and rar are legit ways to DISTRIBUTE groups of files, it is NOT best practice to STORE them as Zip and rar. As with everything, there will be someone with some reason to do it, but do you want to be the jack of all trades bloatware?
It's like when I move house I put things into boxes, but I don't KEEP them in boxes forever.

I'd also like to see support for archive files.

You can argue all you want about how people are "supposed" to use file formats, but if you look at the entire INDUSTRIES such as comic books that use archive files, not tarballs, as the standard format, you see that this is a critical feature for many users. The tarball format, in general, is basically unknown outside of technical circles, with zip and rar being used in place of it despite the lack of actual compression. In the view of most users, the compression aspect is secondary to the consolidation and distribution aspect. I continue to be unable to use XnView full time and to be forced to use ACDSee as my main software tool due to the lack of this feature.

obelisk wrote:As invisifan said tarballs are legit ways to store groups. Zip and rar are legit ways to DISTRIBUTE groups of files, it is NOT best practice to STORE them as Zip and rar. As with everything, there will be someone with some reason to do it, but do you want to be the jack of all trades bloatware?
It's like when I move house I put things into boxes, but I don't KEEP them in boxes forever.

If an archive is equivalent in the software to a folder, as it is in ACDSee, then there is not need to extract it. And extracting it turns a single file into a folder that then needs recursive operations to handle, so if anything the archive is more convenient as storage on the face of it.

This isn't a thing yet? Maybe I check back in another year then.
It's just convenient to pack a set of images in a zip archive, less files on my disk, easier to backup and also easy to share with others without having to recreate the archive all the time.

Any word on proper archive support yet? Still stuck with ACDSee here.

I'd like to see ZIP support as well in XnViewMP, just downloaded an All Attachments ZIP archive from Gmail and wait wait wait... is there a way I can tell XnViewMP to launch XnView Classic for archives?