- New images are copied to several subdirectories, the images have a .xmp sidecar file. XnView is opened for the root directory. How to trigger XnView to import the metadata of only the new images?
- The .xmp sidecar file for some images have been updated. How to get XnView to import only the updated metadata?
- The images are on an external disk, there are up to 20 000 images, and a full update takes forever.
- It is easy to accidentally select the wrong menu item ("update files from catalog"). Then you'll loose all data in the modified .xmp files. There seems to be no way to disable the "update files from catalog" while maintaining access to "update catalog from files" and similar metadata functionality.
I'm trying to use XnView as part of a culling/triage/review workflow for specific projects. In XnView images are tagged with keywords/color labels that are stored in XMP files, another application reads those and knows what to do with the image. The other application sometimes updates the .xmp file to add or remove keywords for an image. New images are placed in batches of up to a few hundred images in new (and multiple) directories with a .xmp file that has the "Triage" keyword and color. Although the final number of images per project is up to 20 000, using the XnView catalog and smart albums there are never more than than a few hundred images in the viewer, and it does not matter how they are organised in subdirectories.
As stated, once there are thousands of files updating the catalog from all files is very slow - and it takes more than 100 times longer than required. I'm looking for an alternative to do that. It's fine if that requires manipulation/customization of the .ini file (also needed to automatically add new color labels) or the sqlite database xnview.db (also needed to automatically add new keywords and smart albums).
The first question is: how to get XnView to register new files in sub-sub-directories? XnView imports the files once they are present in the viewer. I tried opening XnView for the root directory and then selecting "show files in subfolders". It seems to work in some cases, even if the images of the subdirectories are not visible: a subdirectory with a few .mov files was imported, a subdirectory with images was not. You have to scroll to the new files in the viewer, and then only the visible ones seem to get imported. Is there another way to trigger the import of new files? Or another way to get XnView to start up with a view of a specific set of files in multiple subdirectories?
The second question: if the .xmp file is updated externally, how to get XnView to import it? Is there an option/setting to do that? If not, one option is to remove the images with modified xmp from the catalog xnview.db via sqlite, then XnView sees them as new images. This is an acceptable workaround if there is a good answer for the first question.