Configuration survey

On your first run, gpuViewer will ask you if it can send us an anonymous report about your hardware configuration. We care about your privacy and you’re welcome to refuse should you wish to but, please, consider accepting as these stats are very important in letting us decide on where to focus development.

Should you wish to participate in the configuration survey when you have initially declined to, you can do so in menu “Help/Config Survey”.

Catalog selection

Using File/Open, select the folder that is the root of your photo library. gpuViewer will create a file there (index.vg) where it will cache all information it needs. We don’t modify your files in any way.

gpuViewer starts browsing the folder and indexing images every time you open a folder or when you press ‘U’. Thumbnails should start appearing soon, and the process continues while you use the viewer. Closing the application cancels this process, and the next time you will open the application (or press ‘U’) gpuViewer will skip the already known files, importing what it left and whatever has been added in the meantime. On our test machine, pictures are added at a rate over a thousand per minute.

The Click&Zoom interface

The screen starts with a list of thumbnails representing the various years in your catalog. Using the mouse, you can click and drag the screen left, right up and down; using the mouse wheel, you can zoom and magnify these thumbnails. When magnified, they start to display names of months, to then display a thumbnail for each. Continue zooming, and the same process will show a list of thumbnails per day. Depending on the amount of pictures that have been shot on that day, zooming on it will either display the list of pictures or group them in sections to make navigation easier (these sections are marked with plus signs). Check out the screenshots.

Instead of the mouse wheel, you can use the up and down arrows to zoom in and out.

Double clicking brings you to the next zoom level. Year goes to month, month to day, day to photos, and on until photos are zoomed to 100%. Once at 100% the next double-click will return the photo to “zoom-to-fit” level.

The left and right arrow keys move between previous and next photo (or block). This is useful when wanting to skip over a group.

Right-click opens the shell’s menu, when pointing to a photo (ie it does nothing when pointed at a year, month or day). The first item of this menu opens the Windows Explorer, on the relevant folder with the corresponding file selected.

Workload information

At any time, you can press Tab which shows how threads are busy working internally. The histograms show a measure of number of operations done, the blue bars show pending operations queued for each thread. Explaining this in detail is beyond the scope of this page, but this panel is convenient as a means to know if anything is going on “under the hood”.

Since the addition of Intel’s Threading Building Blocks, these diagrams don’t tell the whole story any more, don’t trust them too much…

Photo recognition feature

See Photo Recognition section.