The Media Browser

The Media Browser can best be compared to the Windows Explorer. A tree of drives and folders are displayed, and you can open a drive or folder by selecting/highlighting the item in the tree. The highest level of the tree is the “Desktop”, and below that you can find the main levels like “My Computer”, “My Documents”, “My Network Places”, etc. As in Windows, you can open the main level “My Computer” to get access to your drives. Hard drives and CD-drives are generally referred to as “storage media"--hence the name Media BRowser.

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It is good practice to organize your images in folders and sub-folders on your drives. Although this is not required (as IDimager will keep references to the location of your images in the database), such an organization offers you another convenient way to locate or process sets of images within IDimager, and it also makes it easier to find your photos within other applications.

A common way of organizing images on a drive is to create sub folders based on the date information of the photos. For some ideas on how to set up your own organizational scheme, a useful reference is http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/flow-name-folder.html.

You open the Media Browser by clicking on the folder icon in the far-left Explorer Bar (the second icon from the top). Once open, the Media Browser shows the folder structure of each installed drive on your computer system.

As you select a folder in the Media Browser, IDimager will display the content of that folder in the Collection Viewer. That is the right part of the screen and it displays the thumbnails.

The Collection Viewer contains image thumbnails as well as folder thumbnails. The folder thumbnails are recognizable by the folder icon that is displayed on the thumbnail. By double clicking on a folder thumbnail in the Collection Viewer, you can "open" that folder to display the images and sub folders contained within that folder.

You can change folders by clicking on a node in the Media Browser's folder tree structure. Another way to change folders is to type the folder name in the Active Folders area above the tree, and then press Enter or click on the green arrow icon to switch to the entered folder.

Tip!

If you want to see all images that are contained in a folder and all of its sub folders, then you can click the check box in front of the folder name. Feel free to combine several folders and get the results in the Collection Viewer by checking several boxes

If your images are currently organized in a single folder with sub folders below, then it is possible that you use the Media Browser only on this folder. This can be achieved by setting the root folder for the Browser. The root folder is a folder that should be used as the top level folder in the Media Browser. The default setting is that the Desktop and all drives are displayed in the Media Browser. But by setting a custom root folder, you eliminate all overhead related to tracking other folders in the file system, and it is easier to focus on your images in the Media Browser display. The root folder can be switched on/off easily by right clicking on any folder or drive in the tree.

Once you change the top/root level folder, the tree is refreshed to only display this folder and sub folders. To (temporarily) switch back to full explorer mode, just repeat the same procedure as above. Right click on your custom root folder, and deselect the marked "Make this folder my Root Folder".

In addition to changing the root folder, you can also specify your preferred startup folder. By default IDimager will remember the last opened folder and on a subsequent startup IDimager will return the Media Browser to this last used folder. However, it is possible to define a default startup folder. If defined, this folder will always be used as your startup folder, no matter which folder was last opened in a previous invocation of the application. To define a default startup folder, then again right click on the folder that you'd like to use as your startup folder and then select the option "Make this Folder my Default Startup Folder". To reset the fixed startup folder and return to the default behavior where the last used folder is used as the startup folder, then again right click on the folder and un-tick the same option.

You can also specify if you'd like to see the "Up" folder thumbnail in the Collection Viewer for collections from the Media Browser. This can be switched ON or OFF in the Options dialog; Tools | Options | General Settings | Collection Viewer.

When this option is enabled, you can click on the Up folder to display images in the parent folder that contains the current folder.

You can bookmark regularly visited folders, making it very simple to switch between commonly used folders in the Media Browser. Bookmarked folders are also displayed in the Send To command (invoked by right clicking on a thumbnail in the Collection Viewer); this command is used for copying images to a specified folder.

To bookmark a folder, right click on it and the select "Add this folder to your favorites"

Bookmarked folders are recognizable in the Media Browser by the star icon that is painted on the folder icon.

To remove an existing bookmark, then simply repeat the same procedure. Right click on a bookmarked folder and then un-tick "Add this Folder to your Favorites".

Folder marking is a way to associate a specific status with a specific folder. For example, you can mark a folder red to denote high priority images, or you can mark a folder blue to remind yourself that you still have to assign catalog labels to the images in the folder.

Folders can be marked with one of nine available colors: White, Aqua, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Black. Associated with each color is a defined name; the default assignments are:

These state names are customizable in the options dialog by selecting "Tools | Options | Catalog | Color Labels".

To mark a folder, right click on the folder name in the Media Browser. Then open the sub menu item "Mark Folder" and select the mark that you'd like to assign to the folder:

Once you mark a folder, the color is added to the folder icon in the Browser so that you can easily identify a folder's marking.

In front of every folder in the Media Browser you'll see a tick box which you can click. When you click the box, the folder is selected. After ticking one or more folders in the Media Browser the folder content of every ticked folder with all of its sub folders is populated in the Collection Viewer.

This way it is easy to join several folder on screen to get a complete joined overview of all these folders.