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).

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!

>>681

Known bug, already fixed in the development version.

Any chance of ICC profile support? A must have for most colour savvy users.

>>686

I want it, but it's extremely difficult to do. On hardware that supports OpenGL pixel shaders, maybe, in the future.

xee is great, but version 2.0 highjacked my cbz and cbr files and won't let them go... changing the preferences doesn't seem to do anything.

A couple of things…

First I'd like to say this program is amazing. I use it constantly and would be lost without it.

There is a bug and a couple of feature requests.

Bug: OS X 10.5 (9A527) full screen only shows white screen. Images do not display.

Feature Requests:

1. Option to traverse folders. I have a lot of images nested in folders and it's a pain in the nether regions to open each folder individually to display the images.
2. Hide the mouse curser when in full screen while the mouse isn't moving. Nothing bugs me more than to view full screen images and have the mouse in the middle of the screen interrupting the view. Kind of defeats the purpose of full screen in my mind.

which brings me to…

3. Hud window toolbar in full screen and controller similar to quicktime's full screen controller. I imagine that the hud would appear and give the user rotating, image stepping, image copying and moving etc.

Xee's great! What would make my day are two additional features when cropping a picture:

1. The option of selecting a size with the same ratio as the original, e.g. by pressing SHIFT while selecting.
2. The option of getting some of the traditional picture ratios (e.g. 3:4) in either landscape or portrait mode for the selected portion.

>>689

http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer-hide-your-cursor-at-will/

I am using this little program to hide my cursor globally on idle. It needs to be applied on every start but it does the job.

I love Xee. It works really well. The scrolling is lovely. A couple of requests to consider:

When viewing a large number of images, it would be useful to be able to perform a simultaneous (rotate)AND(shrink to fit). I am starting to get RSI from apple+R then ALT+zero (kidding!)

After a rotate then save, the EXIF orientation tag becomes "unknown". Can its value be modified and saved correctly?

Can we have something like a custom EXIF info window? For example: a small window onto which we can drop EXIF properties from the main Info Window. This way I can display only the properties I like in a compact window. It would also be great if the window could display those properties horizontally like a status bar. Maybe, the status bar can be made to accept a property dropped on it from the info window. Small size is the focus here.

Well, apart from that, I seriously have no complaints. Great work, keep it up, we love you, we kiss you, we applaud!

> When viewing a large number of images, it would be useful to be able to perform a simultaneous (rotate)AND(shrink to fit). I am starting to get RSI from apple+R then ALT+zero (kidding!)

I'll try to think about how to do that correctly. It's really part of a larger interface problem.

> After a rotate then save, the EXIF orientation tag becomes "unknown". Can its value be modified and saved correctly?

Hmm, it's getting set to 0 but maybe it should be set to 1 instead.

> Can we have something like a custom EXIF info window? For example: a small window onto which we can drop EXIF properties from the main Info Window. This way I can display only the properties I like in a compact window. It would also be great if the window could display those properties horizontally like a status bar. Maybe, the status bar can be made to accept a property dropped on it from the info window. Small size is the focus here.

I kind of like this idea, but it seems like a whole lot of work to get right, so it might not happen any time soon.

I take a lot of photos. Then I use Xee to audit and erase those I'm not satisfied with.

My main issue is the pre-caching. I got tons of RAM and it would be great if I could configure the caching to get rid of (by my means) unnecessary loading times.

Any dates on the next release by the way?

Keep up the awesome work!

Hello, I use it Xee constantly to browse me photos. I'ts working fine with may Raw files on Nikon (NEF) and Olmypus e-330 (ORF) but on Olympus e-400 Raw (ORF) I got error "Coulnd't display file "xx.orf".

>>694

Maybe one day I'll make the pre-caching more configurable, but generally that is sort of tricky to get right, so it's not a priority.

>>695

Do the pictures open in Preview?

I love Xee but it always accesses all the files in a folder -- which can be quite a while if there are thousands of photos. I tried highlighting just the photos I want to browse and dragging those to Xee but it still grabs all the files. Is there a way to just browse a selected bunch of files?

Nice stuff!
When for a SVG implementation?
Would be so great!

That would be neat, but SVG is a horribly complex format and there is no way I could implement it by myself, and as far as I know there are no open-source implementations that are anywhere near complete.

Lauri Raittila.

I posted this on Lifehacker, and I think it should meet your needs.

Thought I would share what I have managed to do with Xee.
Thanks to it's ability to open up image editors via the menu interface I thought it would be an ideal candidate for speeding up my digital workflow.
When you have a large number of digital images you want to quickly identify which ones to keep/process further. Enter Xee.
What I have done is create automator workflows which apply a label and add a spotlight comment. The tricky bit is how to make these workflows accessible to Xee. TIf this sounds interesting to you then read on.

1) Save the automator workflow as an appliction. Don't put it in your applications folder just yet!
2) Next you need to open the resulting application in AppHack [www.sveinbjorn.org]
Modify the input file types to include the image types you are interested in, make sure to mark the 'Editor' option for each file type as otherwise Xee wont recognize it.
3) Now move the applications you have created into your applications folder (under a sub-folder to keep things nice and tidy).
4) Right click on some of each image type and check that you can open the image with your applications.
5) Open Xee and check that it recognizes your applications as editors for each image type.

6) Go to SystemPreferences\Keyboard & Mouse. Go to the shortcuts section and add some keyboard shortcuts to Xee to launch your scripts on whichever shortcuts you like!
I have set alt-1,2,3 to set up rankings, alt-x to mark for deletion and alt-c to clear tags.

Hope this is useful to people!

Hello, I liked Xee very much, so I made a translation to Spanish. I sent you the files by email to your gmail account called paracelsus a few days ago. Did you receive them? I'll be happy if next release has spanish translation :) I can help if you need to translate something else.

See you!

>>702

I don't seem to have received them. Either way, there's not much point in sending them to me now, because they won't work with the next version anyway. If you give me an email address, I will mail you when the next version is ready to be translated.

>>703

I just checked out Xee from the google code repository. Is that the most up to date alpha?

>>704

Yes, but it is not guaranteed to even work, and it will change a lot still.

>>705
I was asking more from a developer perspective. I might end up sending you some diffs.

>>703

Okay, when next release is ready, send me an email to my gmail account: mario.arias and I will translate it.

Thanks :)

>>706

I strongly recommend coordinating with me before making any changes, because I tend to re-write and re-organize large parts of the source, and I might easily stomp all over your changes doing that.

Thank you very much for this good piece of app!!! But I would apreciate if you included colour management (just like other people said before)... :)

Is there a way to stop the delete sound effect or replace it with another sound? It becomes terribly annoying after a while.

The next version uses the global OS setting for sound effects.

Love both these apps... hope to see dev continue. One (minor) suggestion is posting dates for the file versions... when I didnt see any I started to wonder if the project was still live. Glad to see the comments are still active!

Hi, first of all, your xee is awesome! I love it! Thank you!
I use it since tiger 10.4.8, and everything just fine. but I just updated to Leopard 10.5 build 9A581 today, and found that there is something wrong with the full screen view. when you choose view the picture in full screen mode, It responsed as a whold gray screen. Hope you can fix it and wait for the new release!

>>713 I can confirm this bug :/
console output:
<code>
27.10.07 00:20:38 Xee[1874] CGSGetSurfaceBounds failed - error 1001 (window:15264, surface:276013567
27.10.07 00:20:38 Xee[1874] CGSSetSurfaceBounds failed - error 1001 (window:15264, surface:276013567, bounds:{{0, 0}, {1680, 1050}}
27.10.07 00:20:38 Xee[1874] CGSRemoveSurface failed - error 1001 (window:15264, surface:276013567,)
</code>

in Leopard(10.5), xee can't link file assocation with ZIP file.
please fix this issue. ^^
Thanks for your development, Good Luck!

in Leopard(10.5), xee can't display image full screen.
only blank screen was displayed.

Please fix this issue. Thanks, Good Luck.

same problem - no full screen (in beta and official 10.5 release)

Same problem with fullscreen in Leopard. Please fix it and keep up the good work!

Thanks
Harald

Same here. Xee does not work in full screen in Leopard. hope you fix it! Thanks!

Gonna have to get a copy of Leopard before I can fix it. It might take a while yet.

Xee fullscreen gives me blank white screen when viewing pictures in Leopard. windowed mode is ok, but fullscreen doesn't work. Will that be fixed, i like this viwer but need fullscreen

thanks

You want this fixed quickly, buy me a copy of Leopard.

I've done italian translation of Xee. Can I send you it?
Another question. Reading this forum, I found spanish, french and german translation. Why don't you release a new version, just to include all avalaible translation made by users of this program? It's a minimal work, but it's usefull to spread of Xee and to increase its popularity.

Thanks for your good application.

Found a bug in Xee that was causing it to go into an infinite loop on the attached image. It gets stuck in the EXIF IFD parsing code. This image that was cropped in Photoshop CS2 looks like it has at least one bad IFD that has a "next" field that references itself. I changed the code to break out if it encounters this situation.

In exifutils.c readifds:

u_int32_t newOffset = offset;
do {

    offset = newOffset;
newOffset = readifd(offset, &(curifd->next), tagset, md);
curifd = curifd->next;

} while (offset && offset != newOffset);

I figured that was better than hanging. But it's possible I've totally misunderstood the problem.

>>727

The exiftags code I'm using for this has a number of bugs. I've fixed some in the development version, but I'm not sure about this one. I'll look into it, thanks for tracking it down.

Why is that I can't modify/change the orientation of a picture? Originally, the orientation is wrong, so I used C and CC to adjust the picture. After that, I saved the picture, but when I reopen the picture, it'd be in the wrong orientation again. What am I doing wrong?

I've even looked under Get Info, and if the image orientation was unknown, after I orient the picture to the right place and save it, it'd still be unknown.

Why is that I can't modify/change the orientation of a picture? Originally, the orientation is wrong, so I used C and CC to adjust the picture. After that, I saved the picture, but when I reopen the picture, it'd be in the wrong orientation again. What am I doing wrong?

I've even looked under Get Info, and if the image orientation was unknown, after I orient the picture to the right place and save it, it'd still be unknown.

I don't know, you'll have to provide more details of what exactly you did. Also check for error messages on the console.

I tracked down that fullscreen bug in Leopard. The problem is that apparently you're not supposed to re-parent NSOpenGLViews. Either use an NSView subclass with it's own NSOpenGLContext or release and recreate the view every time you switch between fullscreen and windowed.

See this email for more info:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Mac-opengl/2002/Feb/msg00180.html

I tried to change the XeeView to an NSView subclass but I still couldn't get it to work even following the instructions in the email. I'm guessing it's a bug in Leopard since it worked just fine in Tiger. Judging by the date of the email, I'm guessing they counted re-parenting as a bug and fixed it in Tiger and just re-broke it in Leopard.

I was able to get it to work by destroying and recreating the view each time though. Things didn't work perfectly but I suspect that's a combination of me not understanding your code very well and me still trying to get the hang of the new XCode tools.

Hmmk, let me rephrase my question then.

How do you change the orientation of a picture if the EXIF orientation is wrong?

>>732

Ugh, what a mess. Perhaps it might be an idea to just wait for 10.5.1 and see if that fixes it before messing up the code horribly just to kludge this?

>>733

If you rotate it manually and save, it's supposed to work.