Thumbnails in preview pane possible

[fletch]

I use XYplorer in a 3-pane mode. Two panes (split) on the left with multiple tabs, each set to Thumbnails #3. Show preview pane is active and on the right side. I primarily use it for organizing photos.

What I was wishing for....

When I click on a folder in either left pane, show thumbnails of that folders contents in the preview pane. Essentially the same view I'd get in that left pane if I navigated INTO the folder.

In this way I can quickly examine the contents of each folder without having to go INSIDE.

The workaround is just to turn on the tree (which I never use) and walk it. The main reason I never utilize the tree view is because the folder thumbnails work so well.

I realize that the preview pane is probably only designed for rendering a single object and it might not be technically feasible to do what I'm asking for. Just throwing it out there for consideration.

[admin]

The Hover Box can do that for you nicely (I use it myself hundreds of times a day):

- Tick Configuration | Information | File Info Tips & Hover Box | Show Hover Box
- Configuration | Information | File Info Tips & Hover Box | Show Hover Box | Select Item Types... --> Tick Folders

[fletch]

I must be missing a step, that only shows the filenames inside the folder, not thumbnails of the folders contents.

[fletch]

Here's a visual mock-up of what I was I had in mind.

xy-folder-preview.jpg

[admin]

No, that doesn't exist. And it would be pretty pointless, since it would take just as much work as opening the folder normally.

[Horst]

Why not, it's a useful option.
It is only a click on the preview button while the cursor is on a folder.

I have it in Total Commander with an Edge previewer supporting Dir mode.
Looks like this for example

k8oaXS9Npy.png

[fletch]

Actually, a little less work/keystrokes/movement.

In my use case it would be just a click or keystroke to change the selected item and the preview window would render thumbnails of the folders content.

As it stands now, I have to go IN and OUT of each folder to view the thumbnails. So it technically saves 2 keystrokes and makes it much quicker to preview the contents of many folders. The assumption being that most if not all of the folders contents would fit in the users preview window. That would be the case the majority of the time in my use case. Otherwise you would have to then move the mouse over the preview to scroll it. But the keyboard could then be used to move the focus to the next folder.

The difference:
Change focus - via click or keyboard action vs Focus/double-click or Enter/Backspace, the latter being the method I normally use to jump into and out of folders.

The workaround:
I can simulate the desired behavior by turning on the tree and then clicking a branch in that tree. From there I can up/down arrow to view each folders thumbnails. Recalling my normal window layout of dual panes on the left and the preview on the right - the thumbnail view in this method is limited to the height of the pane on the left side. Whereas if the thumbnails could be rendered in the preview pane many more could be shown since it's 90% of the screen height. So, that's a workaround, but that "large" beautiful preview pane was just yelling "use me, use me" as I was jumping into and out of folders to check the contents

2-panes because I'm an old Norton Commander geek that migrated to Windows/Total Commander in 1996 and I discovered that XYplorer does this equally well and makes managing photos a bit easier.

Treeview:
The folder tree view was a huge deal when DOS added support for folders. For decades navigating the tree view was a thing and still has benefits. But when XYplorer started rendering folder icons with representative thumbnails, I stopped using tree view for managing images.

[admin]

This is unlikely to happen in the preview pane. Tree and List already do this naturally. It's their day job.