XnView Software

I've been trying to view photos inside rar and 7z and it doesn't work properly. Using v1.98 in WinXP64.

And even with a i7 920 it takes ages to get inside the compressed file and browse. I am not sure if you're aware of this.

It crashes, shows files two times, for some it doesn't create thumbnails, and sometimes it crashes. This in files that are rar, in 7z I couldn't even open them.

Could somebody tell me if it's normal, I couldn't find many topics on this problems, then I thought that maybe not many people rar photos. I put those "7z.dll" and "unrar.dll" in the AddOn folder. But they are from 2007 and 2006, maybe they need an update, no?

since rar saves about 0.5% space, no, very few people keep rars as they need to be decompressed every time you view them. 0.5% space is not worth 3-4 times the wear on my HDD, CPU, and time.

obelisk, I am talking here about a plugin that reads files within rar files without needing decompression, that's why they exist.

In the other hand, I 'compress' them not to save space but to have all photos from a trip together instead of 4000 files in a folder, which makes them much easier to backup amb manage.

There are two styles of archives. In one version you compress the files and put them in an archive. That's fast to get at the compressed files, but the archive isn't as small as in the other version, where you put uncompressed files in an archive, and compress the complete archive. The second style is also known as "solid archive", and used for RAR / 7Z / TGZ / TBZ / etc. The first style is used for ZIP and others (mostly older formats). For "small" archives, say, smaller than your free RAM, solid archives should win and still be fast enough.

For "big" archives getting at individual files in a solid archive must be much slower than ZIP, that's just normal. The bugs you have seen are of course not normal.