8 suggestions from new user

[dpayeur]

First, thank you very much for the great (free for personal use) software. I've been a software engineer for about 30 years, so I understand what developing and maintaining such an app and all its support activities entails.

I'm in the process of phasing out an app I wrote for myself years ago (that needs major new dev) to manage my photo library (about 20,000 pics) and use XnView instead.

I almost got it to look and work exactly how I want, and I'm listing below a few things that I'm missing. Maybe it's already possible to achieve some of those and I didn't find out, yet.

1- Once in a while I want to copy a set of images to a separate location (albums shared to family), while keeping the folder structure. Right now I use the [Import and Sort] command to do that, but that requires re-creating the folders with the EXIF dates again, which some photos might not have. The best thing would be to have a [Keep Folder Structure] option in the [Copy To...] and [Move To...] commands. At worst, allowing saving 'presets' in the [Import and Sort] command's dialog box could help too.

2- I organize my photos in a x:\lib\yyyy\yyyyMM\yyyyMMdd_hhmmss.* structure and I like to click on the year folder and see the whole year (or on the lib folder and see the whole library). For that I use the [Show Sub Folders] command. Still it would be nice if the [Show Sub Folders] command was persistent across folder selection clicks, even better when closing/opening the app (that would require being able to cancel the fetch on an erroneous click on a low level huge folder).

3- It would be useful to be able to 'pop' the current photo selection in a new [Browser] tab.

4- It would be nice to see 2 photos side by side with the zoom and and scroll (using the mouse) synchronized.

5- It would be nice to be able select the currently selected image's folder in the [Folders] pane (e.g. from a search results).

6- In addition to the 'pop up' infos, it would be nice to be able to customize the content of the status bar in the [Viewer].

7- It would be nice to be able to customize the font size and weight of individual lines in the thumbnails labels.

8- It would be great if a photo that's been edited externally be updated (thumbnail + metadata) automatically (assuming there are no pending unwritten meta in the database).

Thanks again for all the great work.
Donald