XnView Software

I have set up Xnview for our church secretary. We are using it to scan in clipart into appropiate folders. Then use the thumbnail viewing to locate an image that is needed for a newsletter article. Select the image and copy to clipboard and then paste into application being used to create newsletter.

In categorizing the clipart, most images can fit into mutliple folder categories. Can Xnview make shortcut in other folders that point to the original image and when you select the image shortcut and copy it you get a copy place on the clipboard.

This would help in conserving space.

Thanks ron

Ron et al,

thanks for asking this, categorizing images is a really important issue.

Before diving into your specific question, I want to list the various possibilites to categorize images:

A - Categorizing using IPTC keywords
The graphic formats JPEG and TIFF support so-called IPTC data. This well structured data has a section "Keywords" which can be used for categorizing images.
Limitation: Only JPG and TIFF files support IPTC data, so this solution is limited to these file formats. Also, at the moment XnView does not allow for searching files containing specific IPTC data.

B - Categorizing using folders
The images are saved in folders which identify which section/category they belong to. For adding images to several categories, simple file links are used.
Limitation: None (?), see below

C - Categorizing using description
XnView supports a so-called "description". This text description can be assigned to any image and is stored in a separate, hidden file named "descript.ion". There's one description file per folder (directory).
Limitation: The description file is seperate from the image, so it might be lost when copying or moving the image file. XnView supports searching the description, but one cannot combine keywords using "and" or "or" (see post "Search in description is case sensitive")

D - Categorizing using database
Some graphic programs use a data base for caching thumbnails, storing extra info and even storing images. In the database, category information can be stored. For example XnView DeLuxe, the commercial version of XnView supports categories.
Limitation: XnView, the free version does not use a database (only cache)and does not support categorizing.

When reading the above solutions and their limitations you can see that at the moment solutions A, C, and D more or less miss out since they are not (or not well enough) supported by XnView. From what I know there's changes and enhancements in Pierre's pipeline to make A.) and C.) work and useable.


Now, I want to answer your question, which is solution B "Categorizing using folders":

XnView 1.66 and newer supports file links: You can set a link to an image file in your file system (Ctrl+Shift + Drag&Drop) and XnView will show the thumbnail of the image in the browser. There's a small arrow in the bottom left corner so that one can see that the image file is actually a file link. When double-clicking on the thumbnail, XnView will open the image file the file link points to. So for XnView, the file link is a real "proxy" for the original image. One limitation is that copying the contents of a linked image is not possible without opening the link.

So categorizing using folders is possible by setting up a tree of folders. Image files appear in one or several branches (=categories) of the tree, either as original image or as file link.

At the moment, I don't know of other limitations of this technique. The one and only thing that I could image is that file links might get broken because a drive has a new name.

Hope this explanation is understandable and answers your question. Once you (or somebody else) has gathered some experience, let us know here whether this works.

Comments, alternative ideas, ... are most welcome.

Greetings,

Helmut