XnView Software

XnView MP is an absolute godsend for managing tonnes of image files, and I make heavy use of keywords and the advanced search function to spend less time filing and more time finding images in my library.

The problem is most of us also have large video libraries as well, interspersed with our images. XnView is so damned good (and is such a capable file manager) that I'm hoping I can use one tool for both. Does anyone have tips on how I could tag video files and then search for those tags using XnView?

I noticed I can right-click to edit a file's Properties and add Tags (I'm assuming this is NTFS metadata), but it doesn't appear that I can query these tags in Search. I've also tried simply adding tags to the descript.ion file, but if I search for "Embedded comment contains X" I get no hits. The type of scenario I want is to be able to do a search similar to "[Field name] contains 'action' AND [Field name] contains 'Miami beach'". Dead easy for images, not so intuitive for a video file.

I realize I'm trying to kludge a solution to something XnView isn't designed for, but I've never seen a program that fills a similar role for video files. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

you can use sidecar XMP to enter your categories and store them

Thanks Pierre. I enabled sidecar XMP files but so far it only seems to store rating and rating colour labels in the XMP file. If I assign a Category to a file it isn't stored. Would like to see XnView able to map Keywords in and out of this file, but again, I understand I'm trying to force an image management tool to manage a file type it wasn't intended for.

Just as an aside, while playing with this I noticed a very tiny bug. If you right-click a file in the file Browser it will list Alt+Enter as the shortcut key for Properties. However the shortcut doesn't work, you can only access file Properties by right-clicking the file. Very minor but I thought I'd mention it.

Cheers!

In order to create keywords in your sidecar files, you must enable "export db category to xmp subject and iptc keyword"
As it's not possible to write embedded metadata in files that are not pictures, you must un-mark "create xmp" and "create iptc"

Of course, "create xmp sidecar" was also enabled

Then, select a file, assign a category, deselect the file, look for his xmp sidecar and edit this one ...

if you enable 'update or create sidecar', category/rating/labels will be saved on it