Tutorial - Xnview Setup

Installing and Configuring XnView

Once you get XnView installed, you'll end up with a setup that looks like this:

To me, the default layout is confusing. There are too many buttons and I haven't a clue what they all do! However, there are hundreds of customizable options in XnView, so we'll go through the ones that increase functionality, (but feel free to experiment), before we get into the usage part of the tutorial. There are waaay too many screens for me to do screen captures of all the options, so I made a table (below) to walk you through them.

On the "View" Pull-Down Menu
Item	Sub-Item	Action
Tabs		Uncheck
Small Toolbar		Uncheck
Preview Pane	Show	Uncheck

On the "Tools" Pull-Down Menu, Click "Options", Then ...
Item	Sub-Item	Action
Keyboard/Mouse	Keybd/Mouse Tab	Change the Mouse Wheel option box to "Previous/Next file" (Allows you to scroll through all pictures in a folder while in the View Window)
Toolbar	Buttons Tab	Uncheck "Show Tooltips" and Check "Show Button Text" (You don't need them both, and text labels are a faster way to work until you learn all the buttons)
	Skins Tab	So you know it's there - I prefer the "Gnome" skin because the buttons are simpler and seem more familiar, but it's a personal choice.
Browser	Browser Tab	Uncheck "Show Tooltips" (Big, annoying popup balloons covering up the thumbnails you're trying to look at!)
Associations		If you like, you can "associate" all the graphics formats you use regularly with XnView. This means Windows would automatically open XnView whenever you double-clicked on a graphics file anywhere in your system, like "My Documents". DO NOT take the easy way and just associate all. You'll be sorry if you do. I clicked the "View as Extension" radio button up top, and checked the extensions bmp, gif, giff, ico, img, anything that listed JPEG in it's description, pcd, png, tif, tiff, and vga. That's all the common ones, and anything else you run across you can open XnView manually then open the file within it.