Release 15.20



XYplorer 15.20 has been released on 18-May-2015. Here's a quick introduction to the main new features:

Drop Stacks. It will take you no more than 30 seconds to create a drop stack in the toolbar, a 24x24 pixel landing place where you can drop files to virtual folders. Extremely handy. And you can have many of them. (Pro Edition Only)

Here's the steps to create a Drop Stack in the Toolbar:

Create a new Paper Folder using menu View | Paper Folders | New... Let's call it "PhotoPool".

The newly created Paper Folder is still empty. (Click to Zoom)

Add a new User Button to the Toolbar using menu Tools | Customize Toolbar... Right-click the new button in the Toolbar, click Edit..., and set its Name field to "paper:PhotoPool" (w/o quotes). Leave all other fields empty (or set the Icon if you feel like it).

Defining the User Button. I found a Camera icon for it. (Click to Zoom)

Done!

Now you can drag-drop items to that button and they will be added to "PhotoPool":

Dragging a file onto the Drop Stack. (Click to Zoom)

At any time click the button to go to "PhotoPool":

The dropped file is listed in the Paper Folder. (Click to Zoom)

Note that you can have as many such Drop Stacks as you want (well, up to 64, the maximum number of user buttons).

Background: Paper Folders are virtual folders, a kind of link collections. When you add a file to a Paper Folder no bytes are actually moved or copied. Paper Folders can contain items from different locations, and they can remember a custom sort order.

Thumbnail Files. Now you can save the thumbnails of images as files. So you can actually do something with those thumbnails beyond just staring at them. (Pro Edition Only)

The powerful new scripting command savethumb() allows you to create miniatures of image files with a single click. It has lots of options, see the Help file for details.

For example, the following script line has been used to create the thumbnails you see above in section Drop Stacks. After selecting the original file in the file list, running this line through the Address Bar will create the thumbnail in the same folder:

savethumb(, "*_t", 550, , "png", 10, 1);    

Thumbnail created by savethumb. (Photo by Anthony Kurtz)

Tip: With a little additional scripting this command allows you to create folder snapshots with images, or websites of your photo collection, in a fully automated manner.

Auto-Select First Item. Now you can have the first list item auto-selected when entering a new folder. Some cannot live without this.
Link View. Quickly check what a shortcut points to before you open it.

Select the shortcut file and open the Meta tab on the Info Panel (F12):

Checking the link target and its properties. (Click to Zoom)

If the target does not exist anymore it looks like this:

Dead link target. (Click to Zoom)

Network Speed. Enjoy speed improvements and smoother handling of unavailable network locations.