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IMatch Bug Reports and Feature Requests => Feature Requests => Archive (Feature Requests) => Topic started by: sinus on December 22, 2021, 08:08:46 AM

Title: More then only 8 files in the viewer
Post by: sinus on December 22, 2021, 08:08:46 AM
Hi
We can have up to 8 files in the viewer.
Since computer are better and better in the last years, and monitors bigger and bigger, I wonder, would it not be possible to have more than 8 files?

Maybe up to 12 would be cool, maybe even more.
I work quite a lot with the viewer, mostly with only 1 or two images, but sometimes it is very helpful to work with a lot of images.

I have now idea, would this be very complicated.
Title: Re: More then only 8 files in the viewer
Post by: Jingo on December 22, 2021, 01:40:07 PM
I would welcome this as well though I typically don't compare that many images at once.. but to view a whole bunch on my 2nd widescreen monitor rather than using a larger thumbnail would be nice.

Soo.... +1!
Title: Re: More then only 8 files in the viewer
Post by: voronwe on December 22, 2021, 02:25:47 PM
+1
Title: Re: More then only 8 files in the viewer
Post by: Mario on December 22, 2021, 02:26:02 PM
8 is already quite high. stretching the limits.

Consider you use 24 MP images. Each image in memory needs about 80MB. For something like a Nikon Z7 this goes up to about 140 MB (!)per image.
80 * 8 = 640 MB memory for one page (!) in the Viewer.
140 * 8 = 1.1 GB (!) memory for one page (!) in the Viewer.

And this means only for one set of images, without any background caching / pre-loading of files in advance.

The graphic card RAM is also a limiting factor, since DirectX needs to move image data from the main memory into the graphic card memory before it can be displayed.
Many graphic cards have only 3 or 4 GB of memory, and this memory is also used for other things and not exclusively available for one application (like IMatch).

And when I look at the telemetry data from the past 6 months, I guess that only very, very few users will ever need more than 8 parallel panels in the Viewer (% of users using #n panels):

(https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=12123.0;attach=28650;image)