XnView Software

Hello

I tried to look a bit from these forums, but I didn't see this suggestion...

An "Image basket" would be nice. Like in ACDsee. It's a panel where you can drag images without actually copying or moving them anywhere in the hard drive. And it would show the thumbnails of the images. This would help if you need to organize many images temporarily.

For example if you have lots of pictures and you need to have some of them resized, you'd browse through your images, find and drag the chosen ones to the image basket. Then you'd have your chosen pictures nicely in one place even though they're actually all around the hard drive.

There's a new commercial version (XnView Deluxe 2 Reloaded) which has two similar features called “Albums” & “Categories”.

The key points of the version 2 Reloaded wrote:Management of the categories allowing to classify a photo in x categories or albums, without duplication of the original photo.

Features — [url=http://www.xnview.fr/site_uk/features.html]Organise[/url] wrote:XnView DeLuxe now has Category management, enabling you to classify your photos into several categories without copying the original photo.

You can also check out this side-by-side comparison sheet (PDF, 200KB). Look for “Organize photos in different Albums (+ categories)”.

I know, but it's not the same, I think. If I understand correctly, you just select the category and you'll see the thumbnails in the thumbnail panel.

But with Image basket you'd have two panels with thumbnails, the regular one showing the content of a directory or a category and the Image basket showing the pictures you've dragged there. That way you can see the both pictures at the same time, the ones you've chosed and the ones you're choosing from.

Guest wrote:I know, but it's not the same, I think. If I understand correctly, you just select the category and you'll see the thumbnails in the thumbnail panel.

But with Image basket you'd have two panels with thumbnails, the regular one showing the content of a directory or a category and the Image basket showing the pictures you've dragged there. That way you can see the both pictures at the same time, the ones you've chosed and the ones you're choosing from.

Yes, i'll add one in a future version...

That's great, thanks

xnview wrote:

Guest wrote:I know, but it's not the same, I think. If I understand correctly, you just select the category and you'll see the thumbnails in the thumbnail panel.

But with Image basket you'd have two panels with thumbnails, the regular one showing the content of a directory or a category and the Image basket showing the pictures you've dragged there. That way you can see the both pictures at the same time, the ones you've chosed and the ones you're choosing from.

Yes, i'll add one in a future version...

I think an image basket is a good thing. If possible it should allow for putting arbitrary images into it and ordering them (light table aspect).

And it would be nice if contents of image basket could be used for operations like copying, renaming, ...

I requested a lightbox function quite a while ago but there wasn't much reponse...

http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.p ... t=lightbox

Eventually I built a crude one in Delphi for myself (73k):

http://www.jfcinc.net/Interfaces/lightboxtest.jpg

It works OK for my purpose (primarily selecting and arranging images for stitching) but I really would like true lightbox functionality built into XNView.

JohnFredC wrote:I requested a lightbox function quite a while ago ...

Yes, I remembered that post, this is why I mentioned it, here.

Your Delphi lightbox solution looks fine. I wonder whether combining an image basket and a lightbox makes sense or whether these are different pairs of shoes: For the light box a lot of space is needed for viewing the images. Whereas for the image basket, it might be o.k. to view the images as thumbnails or even in detail view (perhaps type of view "Thumbnail / Details / List / ...) could be even switchable).

Some thoughts:

An image basket might behave similarly to the browser file list panel... it would be a linear collection of images arranged according to the sorting options and having the views that the browser does... thumbnails, file list, etc.

A lightbox (or light table) interface would be a little different.

The light table would display thumbnails only.

Thumbs would be draggable to anywhere on the table and the table would remember their positions between sessions (see below).

The table would be a 2 dimensional "surface" extending "infinitely" in both directions. So, not only would it need to a vertical scroll bar (as in the browser) but also a horizontal scroll bar, since the user might wish to move some thumbs to positions "off screen" and scroll over to them. (In my little lightbox program I used a Delphi scrollbox control).

A light table would have "zoom in/zoom out" functions that would show more or less of the table surface. For instance, "zoom to extents" would zoom all the way out to show all thumbs present on the table.

Additional functionality would be the ability to explicitly group thumbs using a marque so that if you moved one of them, the entire group would move.

Another idea would be an ability to identify groups by a differential background color for the table surface behind them.

Finally, the ability to name and save, then restore different arrangements of thumbs on the table would be of paramount importance. The saved "table" file would include the filenames, the positions of the corresponding thumbs, the zoom amount, and any associated grouping data.

I suppose that a light table could serve the function of an image basket, but not the other way around.

Hello John !

¤ That you tell above is very interesting. This leads me naturally to think that an “active plugin” might exist…
- Since you worked about this already, why not such a plugin from you ?
- If this could be feasible, I would support such a proposal.

Kind regards,
Claude
Clo

Clo my man, thanks for the compliment, but I am not a good enough programmer to write such a plugin for general consumption. Trust me on this.

I agree, an image basket is probably the only thing keeping me from using xnview full time. It's a great piece of software that's free... I like it better than irfanview on the image browsing aspect.

It's a shame I found this after I purchased acdsee though. Can't wait to see this feature.

Excuse me for interruption of your discusson (old discussion), but I want Image Basket feature in XnView very very!!! I only wanted to post my suggestion and opinion. Thanks a lot for your program!