Contact Sheet Options...

[batfastad]

Hi everyone

I've just downloaded XnView and it looks great - the ability to rapidly create contact sheets of many images is a feature I'm most interested in.
We often have to create A3 proof sheets of 10,000 images so I'll be giving XnView a test.
At the moment we use a freeware utility called Vallen JPegger, but unfortunately it does suffer from speed problems when dealing with thousands of hi-res images.

There's a couple of options I was looking for but I'm not sure if I'm looking in the right area, or if they exist yet.
If they don't exist, I would love to see these features added as XnView could be an incredibly powerful photo-proofing tool.

- Is it possible to recurse subfolders... so you can show all images under the currently selected directory, including subfolders?

- In the contact sheet options that come up, it would be super-cool to be able to set your own preset page dimensions... in mm as well as pixels. Then you could set A4/A3 portrait and landscape.
Also to be able set the page margin and thumbnail spacing in milimeters as well.

- The ability to just generate a JPEG image of the contact sheet straight into a specified folder... rather than appearing on screen and then saving.

- The ability to specify the size of each thumbnail on the page in either pixels or milimeters would also be good so you can completely customise a contact sheet layout.

Any ideas / suggestions?

Thanks
Ben

[Anika]

Hi Ben,
one of the requested features is already implemented. But you have good suggestions. For contact sheets I use DPIC (http://www.cd2html.de/dpic.en.html). It is freeware but is not changed since 9 years. A look at it could help to improve XnView. Let me compare it with your points:

- Is it possible to recurse subfolders... so you can show all images under the currently selected directory, including subfolders?

XnView: In browser mode you can select <View> - <show>.
DPIC has recursion.

- In the contact sheet options that come up, it would be super-cool to be able to set your own preset page dimensions... in mm as well as pixels. Then you could set A4/A3 portrait and landscape.
Also to be able set the page margin and thumbnail spacing in milimeters as well.

For milimeters you must know the DPI as well. If you once have calculated your dimensions you just have to remember them somewhere. In DPIC I can save presets. This would be great for XnView as well.

- The ability to just generate a JPEG image of the contact sheet straight into a specified folder... rather than appearing on screen and then saving.

Good suggestion. In DPIC I can save in a specific folder or in the source path. With recursion I can include the folder name to the index file name. For each folder a set of contact sheets is saved. I even can see a preview.

- The ability to specify the size of each thumbnail on the page in either pixels or milimeters would also be good so you can completely customise a contact sheet layout.

I support your suggestion. DPIC works here same as XnView. Until now you have to calculate your page size from thumbnail size, number of columns and rows, margins and spacing. It would be good to select between setting the size of the page or of a single thumbnail. I the latter case it would be helpful to see the final dimension written somewhere.

I have put a screenshot of DPIC here:
http://anikahenkel.an.funpic.de/diverses/DPIC.png

@Ben: you could test DPIC until XnView has implemented these features.
@all: do you support these suggestions?

Greetings, Anika

[batfastad]

Hi Anika - thanks for the DPIC suggestion
We will definitely try that! Looks perfect for what we need to do!

I'd love to see XnView implement these features as well though.
We would so pay for these features to be added as we do so muchproofing out of photography from trade shows.

Thanks
Ben