Tutorial The Category Tree

Tutorial 2 - The Category Tree (and a little more!)

In this section of the tutorial you will find out how to use the Category tree to select images from the database and also a little about viewing the images and editing their properties.

Your new database should still be open; if it is not then open it now.
Ensure the AND/OR category association is set to AND by clicking Categories - AND Categories. It should have been set to AND by default when you first ran the program.
Examine the structure of the category tree in the left pane by expanding and contracting categories that you created in the previous step using the + and - boxes.
Expand one of your categories, say Location, and select (check the box) one of its sub-categories. Note that it is not necessary to also select Location. There should now be a number of images displayed as thumbnails (as many images as you previously associated this category with).
Expand another category, say Subject, and select one of its sub-categories. Now only those images that have both your selected Location and Subject categories associated with them will be displayed. If there are no images with both of these categories then no images will be displayed.
Right click any of these images and select Edit Image Properties (you could also have used Images - Edit Properties from the main menu). You will see in the left hand pane all the categories that you associated with this image in the previous step.
Add a new sub-category below one of the associated categories, such as the specific location category that you are using. Just call this new category Test (we will remove it later). Check this Test category.
Click enter and now, to narrow the selection further, select the new Test category and you should only see the one image that we have associated with this category. This is how categories are used to find particular images from a potentially very large database.

Viewing the images

Unselect all categories and select Location. Either just click each of your currently selected categories or you could use the Categories - Clear All menu option. Normally selecting such a general category as Location would not be very useful as pretty much all the images in your database would be displayed. If you didn't associate many images with the Location category then just select any category that gives you a reasonable number of images in the display.
To view an image full size - double click the thumbnail. Another click will return you to the thumbnail view.
Select View from the main menu and ensure there is no tick against Shrink To Fit. If there is, click that option to unselect it.
Expand the whole program window to be full screen. (Use the normal minimise/maximise buttons in the top right, or double click the title bar)
Double click any one image to view it full size.
Hit the up and down arrow keys a few times and you should see the image zoom in and out.
Hit the left and right arrow buttons a few times and you will see it step through the next and previous images. The blue left and right arrow buttons on the toolbar will achieve the same thing.
Return the program to a normal window again with the minimise/maximise buttons or double clicking the title bar.

Go to the next step

For more information on the Category Tree go here.