I'm using this now, but I'd like it better if it had these features:

• some way to open a folder from the command line ("open -a Xee ." doesn't work).
• some way to advance to the next image one-handed on a laptop keyboard, possibly with , and . (obvious joke goes here).

Just curious: will the next version be able to remember window size and position?

I really hope so, as it is one of my biggest (and only) gripes with Xee.

Thanks a lot!

>>583

Ok. I'm waiting with impatience the new version ! Does it include the possibility to change the resolution ?

I've just discovered Xee and love it. But I have one little feature request - could you add an option to browse only associated file formats? No it tries to open my RAFs and fails every time.

Someone mentioned that Xee lacks an option to Set the desktop background... That would be quite useful in my opinion. No responded though :)

Any plans to add that?

TTaveira, Portugal

here a few feature request i have about xee
some are from windows irfanview

• open a directory as thumbnail to have a more global view of multiple images (thumbnail size could be define freely)
• when displaying image (full screen or not), you can add a text with name of file, base folder, some exif data like date, aperture, speed, or else
• with the copy/move option, you can define a list of multiple folders with their keyboard shortcut to sort images quickly.
• miss a lot a list of 10 or 50 last opened folders/files

(there is one in xee1 but never fills ...)

• with a thumbnail view, it would be cool to be able to batch some operation like rotation, mirror or file conversion/resize
• one quick operation it would be good to have is change of constrast and light
• option to keep or not status bar in full screen mode.

else, a great tool
thanks a lot for it

note: as i'm waiting for 10.5, i'm still stuck with xee1 for 10.3. so maybe some feature exist. soory for it.

So the thumbnail request...
I understand that Xee is just a image viewer and not a thumbnail indexer/viewer, and the implantation of that may be hard, but a shortcut to the inbuilt fullscreen thumbnail preview of OS X would be great and i think (Im no programmer) relative easy to code.
look at minute 4:00 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKP5fFelYkI they really improved it with core animation in Leopard, its way faster than in Tiger even at many pictures and really looks awesome.

So my wish is that it would be possible to open the inbuilt fullscreen slideshow presenter of OS-X right out of Xee with all the pictures. - only if a direct implantation of displaying thumbnails would be to ... far from the purpose of Xee.
Oh yes and a "set as wallpaper" really would useful :)

Anyway I love Xee, cant thinking browsing my images without it :)

When I rename any jpg or gif file which has Spotlight Commnets, then after renaming these comments are lost... Can you improve Xee here?

>>589

Some of that is implemented in Xee 2, and some won't be implemented any time soon, such as thumbnails, because Finder already does thumbnails for you.

>>590

I've never seen that feature in Tiger. How would one access that?

>>591

I'll look into that at some point, but it sounds more like an OS X bug than anything else.

>>592
select some pictures in finder, rightclick them and choose "slideshow".
Or open them with preview and press shift+cmd+f.
But its only nice when you have 90 pics max or so in tiger.
http://www.google.com/search?q=finder+slideshow

>>593

For me, it's 99 pictures max: 9 rows of 11 pics each.
(unless it's different at different resolutions)

Bug 1:

By default, Space is assigned to both Toggle Animation and Next Image. (that's 1 problem)

But it only acts as Next Image. Even if I remove Space from Next Image, it still won't work as Toggle Animation for some reason. (You'll hear the system sound, meaning no effect.)

Bug 2:

Certain GIFs has a very dark color for their transparent areas.

In browsers, you'll see these transparent areas as white.

But in Xee, they'll be displayed in that dark color.
This can effectively make the image "un-viewable."

Here's an example:

This is the actual GIF image:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v32/dhtns/misc/xee_gif_trans_orig.gif

Here's what it looks like in a browser:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v32/dhtns/misc/xee_gif_trans_browser.png
(see how the transparent areas are white)

Here's what it looks like in Preview:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v32/dhtns/misc/xee_gif_trans_preview.png

But here's what it looks like in Xee:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v32/dhtns/misc/xee_gif_trans_xee.png

Yeah... you can't see much of anything. (If you zoom in, you'll see that it's not actually black, it's just a very dark shade of gray.)

This is why I'd like to request a way to set the color of transparent areas of GIFs, PNGs, etc.

In Preferences, there's a pref called "Default image background" but it does not seem to do anything.
(Say, I set it to red then I try out GIFs with transparencies, but I see nothing red. So I'm not really sure what that pref does.)

> Bug 2:
> Certain GIFs has a very dark color for their transparent areas.

That's not a bug as such, it's just displaying the GIF as it is defined. The problem is that the GIF is specifying a non-sensical background colour. Xee compromises by displaying the transparent colour with a pattern. If I changed it to override the background colour defined in the GIF, there would a lot of other images that would display wrong instead.

You could try complaining to whoever or whatever made the broken image.

Well, I got that image from the Web, so I don't really know who made it.

But the thing is, that's not the only one that's like this.

I've got a bunch that have the same issue.

Yes, I understand that it's the image makers' fault and not Xee's.

But I use Xee as my main image viewer,
so it would be nice if I were able to view my entire collection with Xee without having to resort to opening in a browser for certain random ones.

I'm not saying make "white for transparent areas" the default behavior.

I just want to request a way to set it that way, perhaps temporarily.

For instance, a quick pref under the View menu. (View > "Show Transparency in White" or something)

So that for cases such as this, where nothing can be seen, that quick pref can be toggled on, and you can see it as you would in a browser.

Thanks for your time!

>>596

I might, but I've got a lot of other stuff that needs fixing too.

Thanks for considering it. Much appreciated.

Actually, the number one thing on my Xee wishlist right now is for Xee to remember window size and position instead of always loading the default size.

In any case, I'm really looking forward to 2.1!

Thx! Xee the best!

I think a great feature would be if Xee supported the autorate stuff from cameras with a rotation sensor. It would be very helpful

>>600

It does.

I would like see one feature in next version:
I would like to see filename with path while slideshow/presentation - it should depend on some preference.

^ I 'd like that!

Print capability. That's essential!

>>592 >>591
According to "Renamer4Mac" file comments are lost when things are renamed via the "System" instead of the "Finder"

I have no clue what that means but changing the preference from "System" to "Finder" does keep the Spotlight Comments.

Hi everyone.

Do you know why I cannot seem to be able to have antialias for scaled up images? I have antialias set to smooth high, but if I try to view a small image in a large window( say 200 or 300%), it is all pixeled up, no antialiasing whatsoever. All of this with xee2.0 on a core2duo macbook.

best regards to everyone

>>606
>>317

Ah. Fair enough. Anyway, it would be nice to have smooth zoomed in pictures.

best regards

When I try to open RAW files from an Olympus C5050-z I can see them in the preview pane, but Xee is unable to open the image.

I get a black screen and a statement "Couldn't display file (filename)"

>>609

Can't do anything about that unless I have an image to test on.

Just dowloaded Xee and I really like it. It's pretty much perfect for how I sort my photos with one exception - no capability to add tags/Spotlight keywords. If it could do that then it'd be pretty much perfect in my eyes.

Another thing which would be nice is if there was a preference to control the sound effects/turn them off.

Xee is the best image viewer I've found for Mac (almost as good as irfanview for XP).
I've however found a small "bug"; rotating an image in full screen crops the image and you have to go to normal mode and then back to full screen for it to display properly.
Otherwise it is super!

>>612

That is completely normal behaviour. It's just not changing the zoom level. Use Zoom out or Fit to Screen.

Whenever I use Xee to rotate a picture and then save it "losslessly" the picture quality is still degraded anyway. I read a post dated 2006 in this forum that said Xee automatically saves the rotation of a picture without loss of quality, so pressing Save is unnecessary and actually reduces quality. I guess this has changed? My rotations are not automatically saved, so I manually save, resulting in a very discernable reduction in image quality despite it supposedly being lossless. Also, for cropping, saving losslessly isn't even an option, I have to "save as." Any suggestions?

>>614

The system for saving rotations has changed, yes, you need to manually save. But it really does not degrade quality - there is no way for it do so unless you select Save As and manually pick to save as "JPEG" instead of "JPEG without recompressing".

Also, since cropping is not ever "lossless" as such, as you lose the data you cropped out, you have to use Save As for that. The default option should be set to "JPEG without recompressing" which is the "lossless" mode.

Is there a way to set the current zoom level in a way that it won't change when going to the next image? This would be particular helpfull when doing a presentation (or watching) of digicam pictures which tend to have the wrong size an must therefore manually zoomed 2 times each picture again...

View -> Automatic Zoom

Thanks, that was exactly what I had been looking for.

Since I posted the comment above I've learnt a bit more about metadata and it turns out that what I like is adding tags to the EXIF keywords field rather than the Spotlight tags which are stored in the .DS_Store files. A system like Photoshop/Adobe Bridge where you can store the keywords in a list, grouped together in user-defined categories is perfect. At the moment that's what I use to tag my photos and it seems a bit ridiculous to fire up such a heavyweight app just for tagging, especially as I've converted over to Xee for organising and naming my photos

When using Xee to open images out of a directory (external drive) with many image files (thousand+) the loading time for opening each image is unreasonable long, compared to preview. Is this a known bug, and is there any chance it will be fixed? :)

>>620

Yes.

hi,
thanks for xee, i'm using it as my default image viewer because it's quite fast, easy, light-weight and supports many formats. i just got a feature request: cmm - color management. apple's preview's got it, most other apps have it, too. whenever i open pictures with icc profiles embedded other than srgb, they are displayed incorrectly.

It is on the list, but it will most likely be a long time before I get around to that. It is no easy task.

OS X has built-in CMM, which pretty much every app uses, but it does not work together with OpenGL, which Xee uses, which means it will probably have to be implemented from scratch.

super fast! now i find a image out of hundred in a few seconds.

i like to have a switch to disable the alpha channel.

I just found Xee and it's really nice! I'd like to second the request for color management, though. Lots of my pics are in Adobe RGB mode and they look funky in Xee.

Thanks for the great programs (The Unarchiver too)!

Feat. Req. : PDFs ! And hence, .ai :)

That would be great.

a few more remarks (based on 1.2.1)

• why xee does not retain last used file format when saving ?
• why no "save" option
• is there a way or planned feature to view and edit IPTC tags ? to search them ?

thanks a lot
Bye

> why xee does not retain last used file format when saving ?

Not many apps do that I can tell. I'm not sure if this is a desirable behaviour or not. If you want it, convince me why.

> why no "save" option

This is largely useless. The only common saving operation is lossless save, which exists in 2.0.

> is there a way or planned feature to view and edit IPTC tags ? to search them ?

Viewing, maybe in the far future, searching, no.

Thanks for the app!

I really must be missing something, but I simply cannot figure out how to open the destination list. I was expecting, I dunno, a menu item or a context menu or a toolbar button. But I am completely at a loss at this point. What am I overlooking?

This app is really neat, I just downloaded it right now. It could have saved me a lot of time image sorting before now! Thanks a bunch.

>>630

File -> Copy/Move Image...

Have no requests, just want to say >THANKS< for this great app! It's so superior compared to any other image viewer. Keep up the excellent work!

P.S. All right, maybe just one request: subfolders scanning? Maybe? Please? :)))

I'd love to see a "destinations" pane similar to the iTunes "Sources" pane with the various Move/Copy destinations. It would be much easier to just click (move) or option-click (copy) things to this drawer rather than try to remember what folder is assigned to what number.

• If resizing the window, try to keep the upper left corner stationary - this will keep the toolbar buttons from moving about unexpectedly.
• A full-screen button would be great to have on the toolbar.
• When in full screen, it would be great if the toolbar could appear iPhoto style from the bottom (translucent black), or the aforementioned "Destination" list.

Uh... Is there something wrong with the destination list that is already there? Also, keeping the upper-left corner stationary is makes the resizing itself far less useful and more confusing, and the window already doesn't resize when you actually click the buttons in the toolbar, to avoid them moving around (unless you've reconfigured that).

Oops - I missed the destination list completely. It's fine, but as I and others have noted, it's not intuitive how to find it (not on Window, View, etc - it just appears when you select "Move/Copy" on the file menu). I'd say the interior window pane is more in-line with the way Apple is doing things these days, not that there's anything wrong with drawers.

As for window resizing, if the window has to move to fit the new content, then it has to move. However, if there's no reason (new size fits on screen fine without moving the corner), then it should stay put. I did change the preference to resize windows as needed, because if I'm moving between pictures with different resolutions, orientations, and aspect ratios, I don't want to see lots of big black areas for no reason.

Or (as I just did), zoom out. The entire window shrinks, and the upper corner jumps. There's no way to keep clicking that button to zoom more because the whole window just moved FOR NO REASON. Open up any other graphics program - it won't do that. Or look at completely different applications that resize their windows dynamically - Safari, System Prefs, etc. If they don't need to move that corner, it stays stationary, so that toolbar elements and the window close/minimize/maximize buttons don't move about.

Quoting from the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines (p157):

"When the user changes the size of a window, it affects only how much of the document is visible in the window. It doesn't affect the position of the upper-left corner of the window or the appearance of the part of the view that's still showing."

The entire program is mostly optimized to be used from the keyboard. I recommend just turning off the toolbar. Keeping the corner stationary while browsing through images with they keyboard or mouse wheel causes a lot more distracting movement than keeping the center stationary.

Possibly I might change the behavior so that if you set the window to resize even when clicking toolbar buttons, it will then keep the corner stationary, but it's sort of an uncommon case so it's not very high priority.

It still goes against expected behavior (based on other apps) and Apple's venerable HIG. Feel free to do it however, but it really mucks with the metaphor of the window being a single object that is resizing - moving it about like that makes it feel more like the resized window is a completely different object from the original window. There's no visual cue or connection from one to the other.

But, your program, and a great one it is.

The HIGs are fine, but they should not get in the way of improved usability in edge cases that they do not deal with. This is definitely a case where strict compliance to the HIG would decrease usability.

I would disagree. I don't see how maintaining a fixed upper corner decreases usability - it certainly makes the toolbar and window controls consistent and more usable. Perhaps I'm just not understanding something about the feature?

By all means, please work with me. :-)

I love this app, its super fast at loading sequences of images. One request though...I use this to load .iff sequences rendered out of Maya, and would like either a way to playback a numbered sequence of images in Xee, or could you make it so that there is not the black 'flicker' (which i can only assume occurs cause the canvas is painted black to 'clear' it when swapping between images) when i scroll through a folder full of images so that I can use Xee to replace FCheck for previewing render sequences? Thanks.

>>640

The main usage of the program is to quickly flick through images in a directory. If the top corner stays fixed, this means that when browsing through different-sized images, the center of the image, which is usually close to the center of attention, jumps around, making it harder to take in the image in a single glance.

>>641

The black flicker happens when the image is not fully loaded yet. There's nothing to do about that other than browsing slower.

>>642

Is there a way you could add a switch to preload all the images into RAM to avoid this?

Not easily.

Just curious, what's the ETA for the next release?

Also, I would like to ask if there could be a preference to turn off the "Open" dialog when you open Xee directly (meaning not through opening a file).

(previously asked at >>562 )

And also, I'm also having my fingers crossed for persistent window size and position.

Thanks once again for the great app! Don't know what I'd do without it.

First I have to say, I really like the program a lot, it's nice and simple and to the point... Anyway, I was wondering whether you could add a bit more control over the way it's sorting through the images. Since it's primarily a browser, it would be nice to see an option to reverse the date sorting starting with oldest images first, or newest first, and maybe a sort by modified date(forward and backward too) I know you can do this by sorting the way finder is, but I am not always opening finder to the folder to view images in xee, so its not easy to quickly change the sorting option. Thanks a lot!

>>646

There is intentionally no way to reverse the sort, as that doesn't really add anything - if you want to browse in the opposite order, jump to the last image and go backwards. I could maybe add sorting by modified date, but is there really a situation where this is useful?

One example:

You add new pictures into a folder, and now you only want to browse the new ones.

By the way, "Default sort order: Same As In The Finder" only seems to work if you open a picture from a folder in List View.
Doesn't work in Icon View with "Keep Arranged By..." turned on.

First of all: brilliant little app! The only Problem I have is that the colours of my photos are somewhat shallow. Probably only a setting I haven't discovered yet.

>>650

There are some issues with colour management, namely that it is missing and is very hard to add. However, it's planned for some future version.

>>648

Well, I just mean, as an image browser, it would be nice to be able to browse in the order the user would like. It would just be an option added to the drop down menu to reverse order, it could even be made so that if you click 'sort by date' or 'by name' again, it would reverse, so it wouldn't even make the menu any longer. It's just a work flow thing, so you can start where you want, and not go to the end and work backwards. Why else are there reverse sort options on every file browser/email program/music player/etc.? Not to argue here, but I think it's a pretty useful option, that doesn't seem too complicated or bloated to include.

>>652

The reason it exists elsewhere is mostly that if you actually display a list, the order does matter. When you don't, like Xee, it matters less.

love Xee, only suggestion (as someone else suggested too) was to give the option to disable the alpha channel being shown.

That's weird, you wouldn't think one would need to touch an attribute like that manually. That should be the work of the filesystem to keep track of...

Well, maybe I'll do it, I'll have to look into the details of that though. When I find the time...

I thought so too, it ought to be in the interest of the file system to monitor when files are being opened. I attached an image to this post showing info for three files, all viewed in Xee. The one named 20061126 was the one Xee opened with, the other two were browsed to from within the viewer.

Xee is cewl and my favorite image browser. It would just be cewler if Xee could also PRINT an image (so i finally can trash the OS X Preview app ;-)

I love Xee but a few things I'd like to see:

1. Remembering window size
2. Option for turning off sound effects. (Is there a way to do it now?)

>>656

> That should be the work of the filesystem to keep track of...

The FS updates 'atime' but not Last Opened, which is just for GUI apps? Or something?
I have no idea how to update it either...

I'm a new mac user (Macbook one month old) switching from a 18 year WinP user. I have a Fat32 external drive conneted with my pc files backed up. I was looking for an image viewer for mac that rivaled irfanview for pc's. I found Xee which comes pretty close. I don't have The Unarchiver installed. When I installed Xee it took over association of .rar and .7z files. I uninstalled and reinstalled xee three times and it keeps doing it. Those formats aren't even in Xee's preference format tab. Can this be stopped?

>>663

Get Info -> Open With and Change all... in the Finder.

Thx and sorry for the multiple posts, new to this type board. Actually the .rar and .7z files had no app association to them before Xee gets installed. Just odd seeing an Icon of a cardboard box with a green Xee emblem on those file types.

I just went ahead on installed The Unarchiver and associated .rar and .7z to it.

>>SATANGET

Xee is a great image viewer.

One small trouble:
When I order the photos by date (timestamp) and then start viewing them, the pictures don't show in date order but in name order.
I set "date modified" of my photo files to the EXIF time stamp (jhead helps wth it) and then want to watch the pictures in chronological order (mixed from several cameras, so names don't reflect chronlogical order), but it doesn't work in Xee.

>>668

What exactly are you doing? Sorting by date works just fine in Xee as far as I can tell.

>>669

OK, I see what you mean. There are two sort orders. One in the "Open" window, and another in "Browse" menu. I forgot about the one in Browse menu. I expect that when I sort files in "Open window" in date order and I open the first file, the files will be presented in the same order as they are shown on Open window - in date order.

Now - I found another problem. When I go to Browse/Sort order, all 3 options are greyed out (by Filename, by Date, by Size). They are grey always: when no windows are open, when "Open" window is open, when picture window is open. Onle when a picture window is open I see a check mark next to "by Filename", but all options are still grey and I can't change the sort order.

So, immediate question is, how can I access these sort order options and change the viewing sort order?

And, less imediate question is - when Open window shows files sorted by date, can they be shown in date order when viewing the photos?

I haven't used Xee very long, but already found it much better than any other image viewer tried. But I have a wish for a feature:

I think it wouldn't make sence to demand lots of new sophisticated features only few are going to use, but almost everybody needs. The trouble is of course that everybody needs different features.

I have suggestion for a solution: Make Copy/Move destination list command also work with scripts and applications, not just foulders. Then it would be easy to launch them with the current image as argument.
(Allowing them to be dragged there would be nice as well, but for start, editing plist is easy enough)

I would personally use it for at least these:

• Perl script that publishes picture in internet
• One that would mail it to one other website
• One that would make it ready to be attached on new email
• Perhaps one that would open the file in metadata editor

None of those are features that would make sence to include in the program, as they are highly special, and require lots of configuration.

> OK, I see what you mean. There are two sort orders. One in the "Open" window, and another in "Browse" menu. I forgot about the one in Browse menu. I expect that when I sort files in "Open window" in date order and I open the first file, the files will be presented in the same order as they are shown on Open window - in date order.

Hmm. You are right that this would be good functionality, but as far as I know there is no obvious way to figure out what sort order the user has picked in the open window. However, it might be worth looking into whether there is a non-obvious way.

Also, those menu options should not be greyed out when you have a picture window open. That is kind of strange.

>>671

Well, you can sort of use the "Open in Editor" for that as it is now, but you have to manage to package up the scripts so they appears as apps, which takes some hacking. But maybe the idea could be useful... You could file it as an issue on http://code.google.com/p/xee/issues/list and I might do something about it whenever I find some time.

Thanks for your reply. Open in editor menu is good hint, but I already have my default editor there, and there is no shortcut keys for the rest. (And I have no clue about OSX programming anyway. But it seems easy enough project for starting point)

But I'll file issue on it. I will of course publish the scripts I that would do those things I mentioned if someone is interested.

Hi

I'm new Mac user but I think Xee is the best image browser I've ever seen (on Mac ;-)) but it lacks one tiny feature. Could you add an info in status bar showing image pixel color under the cursor? It's a small feature but IMHO sometimes very important not only for me :)

TIA

Waha, I heart you and your apps.

I was looking for a nice app that will show me CBR files with 2 facing pages. I think Xee doesn't do this, doesn't it? Too bad, I will have to look for an alternative.

Wow, all I can say is wow. I heard about the UnArchiver from one of the Apple blogs a few months ago and instantly switched to it -- amazing it took so long for someone to produce such a perfect archive extraction utility for the Mac, but you certainly did it.

I have been using the Mac for several years now, and am a graphics professional, so one of my pet peeves was always the complete lack of good, FAST, image browsers. Every single one that I tested was either slow, only allowed viewing of pre-selected images, or had some other silly limitation. (For reference, Polyview is what I consider the gold standard on Windows for this kind of speed and flexibility, though irfanview is more widely known and similar). I can't believe I didn't notice until today that the great programmer behind the UnArchiver also had an image browser! And it rocks, it is 99% perfect, is fast and flexible. I'm in heaven.

The ONLY think I can possibly think of that I'm missing is the ability to show the file name while browsing in full-screen. That's really useful just to be able to know what I'm looking at when comparing a bunch of similar images from a shoot. Really, the status bar (and perhaps even toolbar) could do with the ability to show it even in full screen, and possibly choose which items show on the status bar the way you can customize your toolbar. Or if you don't like changing what "full screen" means, having a mode where the rest of the screen can be set to black while viewing images (if you have photoshop, you can see it has two different "full screen" modes, basically what I'm describing here).

But geez, even if you abandoned the software now (please don't!) I'd be recommending it to all my graphics friends for the next several years. Thank you, thank you :)

>>678

Alphons, try out Simple Comic

http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/

It also has a cool feature to switch to previous/next page by clicking the left/right half of the page.

A question about Xee: It can easily be set to be the default application for various types of files. But it seems to be difficult/impossible to reverse the choice! Xee has a list of perhaps 50 file formats it can open. In Preferences>Formats, you can Select all, and it does indeed select them all (and seems to actually take over at least those files I have examples of). But Deselect all does nothing. Each file type has a selection box. Some of them (e.g., Fax Document) can be unselected. Others (e.g., JPEG Image) do nothing if you unselect them. What controls this seems random - about half the various "raw image" formats can be deselected.

Using Finder to set JPEG files back to using Preview works, and if I exit and reenter Xee the box is deselected.

I think I saw the same behavior with Unarchiver, but in that case when I exited and restarted, it let me Deselect all successfully (and I can't swear that it actually ever failed to work.)

Xee Version 2.0 on OS X 10.4.10.

                                                                                                   -- Jerry

I would like to resize images with Xee. Thx!