XnView MP

Here're my configuration tips about this outstanding image organising/editing software from Pierre Gougelet.

About:http://newsgroup.xnview.com/...
Download:http://newsgroup.xnview.com/

Settings

(hit F12 for the settings dialogue)

Browser

-Tooltips
{Filename} {EXIF:Date Taken [y-m-d_H:M]} {Modified Date [y-m-d_H:M]} {Size KB}K {Categories}

where the tags make a line break, the makes bold and is italic

-Preview background color (select)

View > Info tab (shows image info on full screen view, and in the image editor "Viewer" when press "i")

{File Index} - {Filename}
{Format} - {Size KB} KB - {Width}x{Height}
{EXIF:Exposure Time}/ {EXIF:Max. Aperture}/ iso{EXIF:ISO Value}
{EXIF:Date [Y-m-d_H:M:S]}
{Categories}
{Tag status}

set colours/opacity/position below

Thumbnail

-Appearance
no shadow, no background, margin 4

-Overlay
select only Rating and Color Label

-Labels
name, modified, size, image properties, IPTC keywords

- note that setting colours here effects the labels only in Thumbnails + Labels" viewing mode. To change colours of file names under thumbnails when in "Thumbnails + Filename" mode, you have to go to Browser> Item colors and add a file type, then set its color, or default color (I struggle to make it work)

Metadata >IPTC/XMP

-importXMP comment orIPTCkeywordsto db (to get data from files which are browsed)
-export for writing out to files

Integration Settings

-check enable thumbs caching and set to WebP format, which will greatly reduce the database size on disk and make browsing very fast.
-memory usage set to 150mb or higher, for faster browsing too.
-select path of db
-use optimise db once in a while to clear up missing files or empty folders - see here for what it does

Interface > Shortcuts

Space
Ctrl-Space
Shift-Space
Shift-Z
Shift-Ctrl-Alt-T
E
E

toggle tag on file
show/hide tag box
show tagged files
select tagged
clear all tags or Shift-Z, Ctrl-A, Space
open file in edit mode
in edit mode, opens Enhance colours

Ctrl-1 -5
Ctrl-0
Shift-Ctrl-1 -5
Shift-Ctrl-0
j
k
I

apply rating
no rating
apply color rating
no color rating
go back a folder in history
go forward a folder in history
in view mode - show properties

those in blue are mine
under View mode (also for full screen), set toggle tag to Space
Untag all only works when tagged files are shown!

Interface> Toolbar

Add the Select all button to the toolbar, it will be handy when your hands are off the keyboard. + show tagged, select tagged, untag all

Also useful on the tool bar: Layout >, Info pane >, Data pane >,clipboard > , rating stars, no rating, colour label,show tagged,select tagged,untag all,select alletc,

Switching tabs:Ctrl-Tabto move to next tab, alsoLeft/Rightto move between tabs once focused andTabto return to the browser thumbs - or, use the mouse scroll button on tabs.

To remove preview from info pane,

uncheck "Preview as tab" on the Info pane menu and then close the pop-up pane.
Right click on the bar at top of the pane and click on Category sets, which will become a tab at the side.
You can drag it to the bottom until it becomes a pane underneath the Category list, or drag it to the side and it will nest together with it and any other pane you have there, such as info.

I tend to put everything over on the right now, and keep just Favorites on the left. This is so that I can hit the Data pane button to hide/show it in case the Favorites list is empty (currently it happens in Linux version especially at fresh start-up).

Catalogue

They've worked hard to make big improvements to the way Xnview databases files, their meta-data and thumbnails. If you go to Settings > Catalogue you can do some maintenance tasks that will help keep browsing your archives of pictures up to speed. There's a good Wiki page herecataloguing features

Thumbnail compression

set the thumbnails to about the size you prefer for viewing
open Settings > Catalogue and click "Get thumbnail size" (mine are 201x150)
set to Lossy - High quality (Webp)

Using webp saves a lot of disk space, and the quality is not too bad - and perhaps you can put up with lower quality in order to save space and time loading... it means many more thumbs can be kept in the thumbnail cache, therefore reducing time to load the images you are working with most of the time.

Optimise

optimize - basically this defragments the catalogue, which can get large with files scattered about in it, it builds a new db archive and then replaces the old one.
remove empty directories - does what it says
clean thumbnails - will clean out the thumbnails from the db, which can be just too many (and still around since the files have been deleted) and it can't harm, especially if you use the Webp format which is speedy
clean files - remove all files from the catalogue which have no metadata recorded from them

Other tools allow for deleting selected folders from the catalogue or all of them in one go. Rebuild thumbnails will take a very long time.
The "add folder" button willcatalogue the files from a location - incase you wanted to build the db from scratch or from added files without opening the folder in the Browser.

Multiple instances of files on the harddisk means multiple same images in search results...

But there's complete control over this (apart from removing directories from the disk) with the Cache DB page in Settings. If you want to prevent certain folders' files having their IPTC keywords (as well as thumbnails) added to the database, exclude those folders on the 2nd tab. working?

If you browsed them~~alreadybefore excluding~~, then any IPTC "categories" will have been added to the db -but you can ~~now exclude the folders and then~~ locate their cached data on the 1st tab and delete the entries, finally clicking on Optimize.

Does this mean that the exclude only refers to thumbnails and not IPTC/XMP keywords?? see the web page above.

UI colours

1. edit the style sheet

(I use dark theme - you can play around with the colour values to suite your needs)

geany ~/.xnviewmp/style_sheet.qss

/*---set category name text color in Sets, (changes address bar text too) at top add:

:active{
 color: rgb(183,183,183);
}

/*----pane separator color

QMainWindow::separator {
background: grey;
  width: 4px; /* when vertical */
  height: 4px; /* when horizontal */
}

/*---folder tree background
QMainWindow{
background-color: rgb(25, 25, 25);
 /*background-color: rgb(25, 25, 25);

/*---colour of info panel (except preview background)
QTreeView{
  background-color: rgb(20, 20, 20);
  alternate-background-color: rgb(40, 40, 40);

/*---folder tree/info/category item text
QTreeView::item{
  color: rgb(160,160,160);
  border: 0px solid green;

/*---background colour around thumbs in file list
QListView{
background-color: rgb(30, 30, 30);
  border: 1px solid black;

/*---set progress bar color:
QProgressBar::chunk{
  background-color: qlineargradient(x1:0, y1:1, x2:0, y2:1, stop:0 rgba(140, 60, 30, 200), stop:1 rgba(60, 60, 60, 60));
  border: 0px solid rgba(180, 180, 180, 200);
  margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px;

/*---set tooltip colours:
QToolTip{
   background-color: qlineargradient(x1:0, y1:0, x2:0, y2:0, stop:0 rgb(400, 400, 400), stop:1 rgb(120, 120, 120));
}

thumbnail labels background set in Settings >Browser/File List >Default color

2. edit the config file

geany~/.xnviewmp/xnview.ini

folder icons colours

find something like the following:
m_folderColor1=100 149 237
m_folderColor2=110 123 139
m_folderColor3=132 112 255
m_folderColor4=122 103 238
m_folderColor5=132 112 255

these are my quickly chosen values. change RGB values as required and note that:

=Top color of the gradient area
=Bottom color of the gradient area
=Outline color of the folder tab
=Background color of the folder tab
=Color of the left and right edges

you'll need to restart Xnview and might need to rebuild thumbnails to make folder icons change colours to what you set.

to change colour of the highlight frame around a selected fileadd this line below the folder colors :
SelBorderColor=119 136 153
although it doesn't seem to work for me!

see herehttp://www.xnview.com/wiki/index.php/UI-less_Settings
see for more help with the stylehttp://newsgroup.xnview.com/...

3. Category sets

- background colour too light for Dark theme (this is changed as of 0.94)
Go to View > Themes > Dark theme and paste these line under "QDockWidget QScrollArea" entry:
Then click Apply.
the 3rd item is the set title color

Next page:

Text editor - configure geany/SciTE color schemes