XnView Software

tl;dr I need way to switch to other image (sidecar image; mask) corresponding to the original image.

I've got a problem and I wonder if XnViewMP could be used somehow in solving that. I'll try to explain it, but just in case I'll add numbered list of basic needs. When I'm reviewing images I want to use masks* - something batch created by 3rd party software. They might be important for some images, for some I don't need them at all, so I don't want to browse images and see them (so saving as other files, like a.jpg, a_mask.jpg, b.jpg, b_mask.jpg, is not what I'm looking for). I want to see them on demand. Now, would be there a possibility of doing that somehow in XnViewMP?

For sure I could create multipaged image, any format, which would contain original photo as 1st page and mask as 2nd page. That's far from ideal, because probably I'd have to recompress original images and the point of the review is to get ideal one out of series, with often very little, almost impossible to see differences**, so compression artifacts would undermine the work and creating lossless copies of a few hundreds GB of images would take too much space.

The basic assumptions of the task:

1. Mask files must be invisible to XnView when browsing
2. Mask could be easily turned on and off
3. Retaining zoom when switching to mask (the zoom/position lock which already exists in XnViewMP)
4. [Optionally] Without creating more files (e.g. multipaged file with img and mask)
5. [Optionally] More than one mask (I use different ones, one could be for shaprness, other for different kind of noises, other for highlights/blacks)

So far such feature doesn't exist, but maybe there's some way to achieve that, like said multipaged image (which is not ideal, so I'm looking for other ways). Maybe some plugin dev already worked on something like that? I'm programmer, but C(++) is totally not my thing. Even crazy ideas needing 3rd party software (which may not exist yet) are valuable. I understand that hackish ways may be involved, but even dirty, hackish way is more cleaner to me than to manually switch image.

Even if you have an idea that would need some repetitive tasks, I'd be glad to hear it - maybe it could be easily coded. If it matters, I'm using mainly Windows, but eventually I could use alt PC with Linux, if needed.

* it's not quite important, but something like https://i.imgur.com/6mr0oJf.jpg (two images - original and mask/sidecar - stacked vertically for convenience)
** which would make difference in later processing, hence masks which makes certain details visible

krzysiu wrote: Thu Feb 06, 2020 6:31 pm because probably I'd have to recompress original images and the point of the review is to get ideal one out of series, with often very little, almost impossible to see differences**, so compression artifacts would undermine the work and creating lossless copies of a few hundreds GB of images would take too much space.

If you use TIFF multipage as lossless compression?

I thought about it and it's so far the best I can do, but there are some cons to native function - a) weights a lot, b) if I'd mark/delete/move image, then it would be TIFF, not original, c) I couldn't compare two images by switching over and over to prev/next because with every switch it would reset to the first page. Generally I could live with a and b, but c seems to disqualify that method.