XnView Software

Just downloaded XView. Looks great!
But not all of it is intuitive.
For example ...
1. when the mouse hovers over an image, 3 tiny icons show up. The star is surely a "favorites" icon. But what is the little circle and banner for?
2. When I add "categories" to an image, is that something that goes into a database only or does it also add a tag to the image file?
3. More importantly, what can this thing actually do besides categorize pictures? And how would one go about accomplishing those tasks? I see lots of possibilities in the Menus, but can't tell from the items what they really do. Looks like some kinds of conversions are possible, but what? and how?

I can't find anything that looks like documentation.

Edit
/ Sorry, i did not locate your post, my answer was for XnViewMP version. Xnview classic is not very different but I don't use it /

> Answers for XnViewMP :

1. when the mouse hovers over an image, 3 tiny icons show up. The star is surely a "favorites" icon. But what is the little circle and banner for?

Stars are a way for rating photos. From 1 to 5 stars. Years ago, rating was stored in exif data, now we can store them in xmp data (settings, metadata)
Circles works like stars: name is "Color labels" you can choose color labels for your photos (see settings, metadata, labels) normalization is blurry.
Banners become yellow when at least one category is given to a photo.

2. When I add "categories" to an image, is that something that goes into a database only or does it also add a tag to the image file?

See settings metadata : here you can enable "export ...category ...to keywords" and choose xmp or iptc metadata.
JPG files can get these embedded metadata. Raw files need "Sidecar" files.
Using metadata is a safe way to prevent loosing your work if database (= catalog) is lost or damaged, or if you use another software later.

3. More importantly, what can this thing actually do besides categorize pictures? And how would one go about accomplishing those tasks? I see lots of possibilities in the Menus, but can't tell from the items what they really do. Looks like some kinds of conversions are possible, but what? and how?

You can try to read some lines of my web page (link below) through google translate

As you begin with Xnviewmp, do not use two features in "Edit iptc" or "edit xmp" window : neither iptc categories nor keywords. Use only categories pane of main screen to keep categories and keywords synchronized.

Thank you for your reply, both to some specific questions and to the problem of documentation generally.
Looks like you have done some extensive documentation (in French) and I will try to wade through that.

Seems a shame that such a good program is so hard for a new person to take advantage of.
To be frank, a lot of the technical jargon and acronyms have no meaning to me at all.
I'm simply looking for a way to categorize hundreds of images so I can find what I'm looking for w/o paging through them all.

If anyone else knows where I can find help for this program, I'd love to know about it.

I was about to create a post asking the very same question (after I did a search and was unable to find a Help file or other any documentation).

XnView is a very flexible program with lots of options (many of which are not immediately understandable). I would therefore have thought that some kind of help file (if only for the Settings pages) would be essential.

It does not even need to be done by the developer, a wiki type of setup could allow any experienced users of XnView add to the documentation to explain a particular feature or setting, without requiring one person do it all.

In fact, there is a wiki. However it isn't up to date and it isn't clear how to contribute. For example, this article refers to Tools | Settings | Database, which doesn't exist in XnViewMP 0.98.2. Instead the settings referred to are under Tools | Settings | Browser | Catalog.