The Media Explorer 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 namer Media Explorer.
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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 ishttp://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/flow-name-folder.html.
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You open the Media Explorer by clicking on the folder icon in the far-left Explorer Bar (the second icon from the top). Once open, the Media Explorer shows the folder structure of each installed drive on your computer system.
The first time that you start IDimager, the Media Explorer will be opened in IDimager's sample photos folder. The sample photos are intended as demo-photos, and they can be used to test out IDimager's features before working with your own images. The right part of the screen shows the Collection Viewer, whose contents is created based on the images found in the selected folder.
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 Explorer'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.
Changing the Root folder
If your images are currently organized in a single folder with sub folders below, then it is recommended that you use the Media Explorer only on this folder. This can be achieved by setting the root folder. The root folder is a folder that should be used as the top level folder in the Media Explorer. The default setting is that the Desktop and all drives are displayed in the Media Explorer. But by setting a custom root folder, you eliminate all overhead related to tracking other folders in the filesystem, and it is easier to focus on your images in the Media Explorer 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 the Root". The root can also be changed in the options dialog, tab sheet "General".
The options dialog also allows you to specify the preferred startup folder. This is the folder that you'd like to select by default after IDimager starts up. If you keep this setting empty, then IDimager will start in the last visited folder.
You can also specify if you'd like to see the "Up" folder thumbnail in the Collection Viewer for collections from the Media Explorer. When this option is enabled, you can click on the Up folder to display images in the parent folder that contains the current folder.
Bookmarking folders
You can bookmark regularly visited folders, making it very simple to switch between commonly used folders in the Media Explorer. 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, go to the Active Folders box, located in the upper area of the Media Explorer.
To bookmark a folder, click on the star icon behind the active folder. A menu will open up and you can select the entry “Add this folder to your favorites”. Once a folder is bookmarked you can use it to quickly re-open the folder.
Click the drop down arrow behind the active folder field and select your bookmarked folder from the list. Bookmarked folders are recognizable by a star icon that is displayed in front of the folder’s name.
To maintain your existing bookmarks, again click the star icon, and select the entry: “Manage favorites”. This will open up a new dialog that displays all existing bookmarks.
To remove a bookmark, select the bookmarked folder name, and then click the delete button in the toolbar (the red cross). You can also manually enter new bookmarks in the Bookmark Editor by clicking on the new button in the toolbar (the yellow folder with the blue dot).
Folder Marking
This is an IDimager Pro only feature
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 five available colors: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple. Associated with each color is a defined name; the default assignments are:
Red = High Prio
Yellow = Low Prio
Green = Work planned
Blue = Work in progress
Purple = Round-up
These state names are customizable in the options dialog by selecting "Tools -> Options -> Other Settings -> Folder State Definitions".
To mark a folder, right click on the folder name in the Media Explorer. 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 Explorer so that you can easily identify a folder's marking.
Marked folder are also included in the drop down list of the active folders.
Folder Selections
In front of every folder in the Media Explorer 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 Explorer, you can click the green run button in the ME's mini toolbar to get a collection of all the checked folders, including all sub folders.
This way it is easy to join several folder on screen to get a complete joined overview of all these folders.
A double green check mark indicates that the folder will be read including its sub folders. A single check mark indicates that the folder will be read without its sub folders.