👨‍💻 XnView or NeoFinder?

When dealing with a large catalog of images and videos, what is the better tool to work with, XnView or NeoFinder?

On the surface they seem similar. They both catalog volumes for content, specifically images and videos. However, the main difference and advantage of NeoFinder is it’s offline catalog and larger file format support. We go from XnView being a viewer to NeoFinder being an asset manager.

Case in point, I have more than two dozen external drives hooked up to this Mac Pro. There are 5 enclosures with drives ranging in size from 3TB to 8TB. Most of the time, all the external drives are offline. When I need something, what’s the best course of action?

With NeoFinder, each drive has a catalog. I can see the volume contents when the drive enclosure is off. If I’m looking for a song, document, image or video, I can find the right volume without turning on every drive to search it.

Using this, NeoFinder helped reveal I had multiple copies of the same files across different drives. I had backups of backups and repeated downloads. This lead to great Merge and Purge of a couple months ago. And I’m not quite done yet.

XnView works great for viewing/playing content on your local drive, when you have a good idea where to look.

NeoFinder is the right tool if you have multiple drives, especially when those drives are external and not always on.

The only thing to keep in mind with NeoFinder is volume updates are manual, at least in the standard version. If you delete or add content, you have to manually select the Update feature to refresh the catalog.

If you’ve come as an elf, see it through as an elf.
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