Actually I wrote this post because I miss some advanced picture management functions in xnview like categorizing images. There was another one post on his forum where various ways of categorizing and organizing images were discussed. Here it is:
http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?t=938
However there are some problems with any of this methods.
A - Categorizing using IPTC keywords
Works only with JPEG and TIFF. Another problem - assume that I want to view my pictures categorized as "cool cars". To do so I have to start new search, enter "cool cars" as search phrase, hit "search now" and gaze some minutes at my monitor while my whole 3 Gigabyte picture collection is scanned for cool cars (I am actually not sure if this search function is already implemented in xnview, but that's the way this function works in another picture management programs).
B - Categorizing using folders
Nice! I can make folder "Nature" containing folders "high mountains", "deep waters" and "funny monkeys". Than I can put file links to my nature pictures in this folders and have well categorized collection. It is very simple, doesnt require any special program feautures and works very fast. But... If I rename or move to new location any of my pictures, link wouldn't work any more. Furthermore links contain absolute pathes. On my desktop I have my pictures in E:\My Documents\My pictures\ but on the laptop they are in Z:\My Pictures. It means that after file synchronization links from my desktop wouldn't work on my laptop and vice versa.
C - Categorizing using description
The same problem as with A. It takes a lot of time to scan all of files for special keywords and the search procedure is too complicated.
D - Categorizing using database
The same problem as in B. I cannot synchronize database in my laptop and desktop because of various pathes. Also if I copy my pictures to another location in Windows Explorer, database information wouldn't be copied because it is not in the picture folder but somewhere in program location. Another problem: assume that I have my private documents like scanned letters from my grandma, pictures of my girlfriend wearing lingerie and plans of world domination saved perfectly secure in encoded partition on my laptop
However in my database there are categories "World Domination", "My girlfriend half-naked" and "Will of my grandma". Even worse! There are thumbnails there! Not good... Well, I can turn caching images off but I cannot disable category functionality because I need it.I've speculated for a while about how to organize pictures and here is my idea about how it could work:
Special album files are used to categorize images. Albums can be created from within xnview and saved in any location on your computer just as ordinary files. Xnview could handle this albums as normal folders, so that you can drag&drop any images to them and click on them to view images, which are inside. You should also be able to add albums to your favorits like normal folders. These albums are just text files with a special extension like .xva (for xnview album, just an idea). They contain pathes to the images which belong to those albums. However those should be relative and not absolute pathes. For example, we have our pictures in D:\My Documents\My pictures. Album files are stored in D:\My Documents\My pictures\My albums
So if one album contains link to D:\My Documents\My pictures\My friends\big_boss.jpeg
then the relative path would be something like \..\My friends\big_boss.jpeg
I don't know if this "\..\" can be interpreted by shell. But the program could interpret it as a command to go one level higher in the folder structure and search there for "My friends". The idea is that links shouldn't be restricted to a special disk letter or special root path. Albums should be in the data structure of the image collection. The advantage is that the albums can be copied or synchronized with this data structure, are indenpendent from local data structure on local PC and can be encoded with the images.
The images must also contain information about which albums they belong to. I am not really familiar with those descript.ion files. I assume that they can contain any kind of information linked to files. If so, xnview could write the relative path to an album for every corresponding image in this descript.ion file. If moving or renaming an image, which is in an album, xnview would scan descript.ion file and automatically update file path and name in the corresponding album or albums. If descript.ion doesn't allow to keep such kind of information, then xnview could save its own description files in image folders.
There could be also some additional functions like a wizard for automated convertion of existing normal Windows file links into xnview albums.
Let's summarize now. The meaning of albums is categorizing images. This system doesn't replace IPTC functionality but complements it. It is easy to implement. It works fast because only files in the album are loaded instead of searching through all files. It allows you to create very complex structure of categories, with many subfolders and possibility of adding one image to as many categories as desirably. It doesn't depend on a special data structure on a local PC, albums can be easily copied or synchronized to another computer. Albums can be encoded with the image files. The only restriction I can see is that you have to use xnview to rename or move or delete your images if you want your albums to be updated correctly. Theoretically it could be possible to write a service programm which runs in background and traces any changes made to files with descript.ion, updating albums even if xnview isn't running. But that isn't necessary at this time I think.
So I would like to know what do you think about this idea. Is it possible to integrate it in xnview? Does it make sense at all? Are there some other problems?
My regards and appreciation to the xnview team!!!
P.S.: I've just got another idea. It could be possible to create a special search routine, which can scan folders with pictures choosen by user for IPTC keywords or keywords in descript.ion and automatically create a special album for every keyword in a choosen directory. It would allow you to categorize your existing picture collection for use with xnview.
