XnView Software

finding doubles: fullscreen/layer-compare, mutli-doubles presented together, double folders


The function to find similar Images is very usefull but has a few shortcomings and additional features could increase usability and can make it an even better time saver.


(A)
Long paths are not fully displayed in current version.
2 workarounds would be possible:

1.
C:\User Files\...\holiday\2007\sweden
-> This means the *middle* of the path is shortened ( " ... " ) but the drive and the folder containing the acutal picture are bopth shown.

2.
Just use more than one line:
C:\user files\media\visual\pictures\people\family\
holiday\2007\summer\sweden



(B)
Trashcan-symbol at each of the pictures to directly trash it.

(C)
What I miss is the possibility to compare the pictures in full-size and zoomed to fit the screen.
The best way to do it is the iPhoto-method where you have the pictures fullscreen in 2 layers and a line in the middle to blend the 2 similar pictures: you move the line from left to right and you have one picture on the upper layer (which you see entirely by moving the line completely to one side) and the other picture on the lower layer (which you see entirely when you move the line to the other side).

(D)
I`d like to propose a graphical element, a bar, that proportionally shows the file-size of the images. (the biggest is 100% the smaller ones 100-x %)

Something like a progress bar. So you can directly identify the bigger file without having to look at the filesize in numbers.



XXXXXXXXXX............X....XXXXXXXXXX
X................X............X....X................X
X....PIC1.....X............X...X....PIC2.....X
X...20KB.....X.............X...X...500KB...X
X................X......X.....X...X................X
XXXXXXXXXX......X.....X...XXXXXXXXXX

.........................^.....^
.........................|.......|
...........................size
.....................illustrated
...................with graphical
..........................bars

100% can either be the filesize of bigger picture of the 2 that are currently compared
or
100% could be derived from the biggest filesize the user had so far in his/her collection.

So far I used DupDetector ( www.prismaticsoftware.com ).
It works fine but could be more userfriendly:
It misses for example to display the path below each picture and is more complicated than necessary.
The program might give you some ideas though what XnView could do better.


(E)
Also compare to the same pictures MIRRORED TO THE MIDDLE-AXIS because sometimes somebody has executed this operation and you end up with 2 pictures that are identical but one is mirrored.


(F)
When searching for double pictures it might happen that there are 3 or more copies of a particular picture. It would be very usefull to present those multiple doubles all together.

(G)
It might also happen that there are complete folders containing a whole bunch of doubles (so the complete folder is a double OR there may be a few extra pictures in one of the folders).
It would be most convenient (I think) to have that detected automatically aswell and have an option to merge those folders and to delete folders which are empty after the containing doubles are deleted.

I`d like to add:

It would be very usefull if the bigger picture (or biggeST picture in case there are more than 2 identified doubles) would be always at the same position - on the left for example.
This way the user could just stay on one side with the mouse pointer and trash the smaller or bigger picture each time.

In case of many doubles there might be several rows of pictures. in this case the images could be sorted from biggest in the top left corner to smallest in low right corner of the window. Don`t forget the possibility of scrollbars as the number of detected doubles may not always fit in a small window.