XnView Tips

Tutorials >
Tips
Search Similar files tool
Xnview's developer, Pierre, is constantly working to improve his great image/video browser and of note a few very welcome improvements have been made... now delete sends files to the .Trash dir on the same disk (before they were lost), and there is now a Draw function in i,age viewer, which allowr for shapes, text and watermarks (no paintbrush though).

Database


Thumbnail generation and import of IPTC data etc is only made and added to the db as you load the images from each folder, so if you want to build your db in one go, select a folder in your list in Tree and then press the Show sub-folders on the Tool bar, and wait for the loading bar to reach 100% (to allow importing image data to the db) before moving to another folder.

Better, go to Settings > Catalogue and use Add Folder, and let the contents be added to the db - bear in mind this may use up quite a lot of RAM, especially if you add a folder with 50k images or more - so keep an eye on it in case it slows your desktop to a crawl (if it does, Ctr-Alt-F2, login, killall XnView).


Edit XMP/IPTC data


you can select multiple (or single) images and edit the IPTC data with the right-click context menu, which is useful for wiping all keywords.

Use the Categories pane to set keywords to multiple files (effects when clicking on the List again)


Grouping files

as there is currently no album feature, to group files for export or whatever:

1st off, add the "Select tagged files" and any rating stars you will use to the tool bar, or make shortcut keys, then,
  1. select with mouse
  2. hit Space to tag/untag
  3. when done hit "select tagged files"
  4. Ctrl-1 -- Ctrl-5 to apply star ratings
  5. untag all (or leave them tagged as closing the program will untag them if set to do that)
  6. move to next folder


! Setting the save quality !

Make sure you test with some copies first to find out what % you need, so you don't overwrite originals losing image quality.

This setting is in File menu > Formats in the Preview tab.


Problems

can't filter folders by category (yet - even though "Global/Folder" has been added to the Match drop-down in the Categories Filter pane) -category shows images from the whole db.

images removed or renamed with another programme will still be found in the Xnviewmp db (as file names) but the thumbnails will be blank in Category view

solution: Settings >Cache DB > click on Optimize and OK

images loaded in the Browser (added to catalogue) and moved to another folder, given ratings etc (had metadata written to xmp file) and moved back to original folder, the thumbs will not show the new rating star or color code, because the db sees them as they were in that folder to start with (without ratings).

solution: select those thumbs and Edit > Update catalogue from files or right click and Rebuild thumbnails - but I've had times it doesn't work, the thumbs remain with no ratings showing (but in the info pane, under XMP, you can see the ratings are there - only fix is to move the files to a new folder and browse the folder).

solution 2: move the files to a new folder and they will be entered to the catalogue again in new location, after that the thumbs will show correct rating etc.



Search Similar files tool


Find this on the Tools menu. You can load files to compare with another directory for similar file name, file data or picture content. When you have selected files and/or folders, hit OK and the tool searches. The results show up in a new window, and similar files/photos sit side-by-side. You can then copy/move/delete either one of them by buttons under the images. It would be nice if you could select all and copy but you can't!



Search for Originals on back-up media?


I wanted to use the Search similar files tool for this but it was going to take too much time, searching and copying files one by one from the search result.

So I use a script to take a list of file names in a file, search for them on a specific location, copy the files found to another location and report any files that were not found, printing those filenames to another file.  

Here's how: