Use the Image Finder (Ctrl+F) to quickly find images in open browsers.
Use the The Power Filter (Ctrl+P) to find images across all known volumes.
Image Finder
The Image Finder provides a quick way of finding images by searching all open browsers. The thumbnails that match the search criteria are selected and optionally moved to the top of the browser. There are three image finders integrated into a single window:
Similar - Uses fuzzy logic to find images that look similar.
Image Finder - Pattern tab
This tab lets you find images by file name or part of a file name.
Image Finder - Pattern tab
Enter a filename pattern... is where you type the pattern to search for. The string you type will be considered a match if any file name contains the string. You should not use wildcards (*) here because they are not supported.
Match case makes the search case-sensitive.
Exact match makes the search only find a match if the file name exactly matches the specified pattern.
Image Finder - Attribute tab
This tab lets you find banners or broken images.
Image Finder - Attribute tab
A banner is an image that has an aspect ratio of less than 0.255 or greater than 3.999 and whose longest side is less than 1000 pixels. This means that very thin images, but not large panoramic ones, are considered to be banners. Images of this nature are often found as advertisements on web sites. The numeric values above are currently hard-coded but may become user-definable in a future version of PMIO.
A broken image is an image whose thumbnail information was not successfully loaded. These images most often appear in old baskets whose referenced files have long since been deleted.
Image Finder - Similar tab
This tab uses experimental 'fuzzy logic' to find images that 'look like' each other. It is particularly good at finding images that are copies of the same picture with different quality or colour casts, such as are commonly found on the Internet. It is not good at finding images of the same kind of subject or the same person from different angles. It works by comparing the trends in changes of brightness across the width of each image pixel-row.
Image Finder - Similar tab
Threshold allows you to control the threshold for fuzzy searching. Note that you can only adjust this control manually if the Automatically find option is not checked.
Automatically find causes PMIO to keep increasing the threshold automatically until at least a certain number of matches have been found. The number of matches required can be specified in the associated text box.
The Open Image tool button opens the image associated with the thumb that the window is currently displaying.
The Lock Thumbnail tool button, if pressed, locks the current thumb displayed in the window. Otherwise it will change to be the last one selected in a browser.
If you right-click on a thumbnail and choose Quick Find Similar, PMIO will run the find similar function on the selected thumbnail without opening the finder window. It will use the last known settings of the find similar tab. This saves you the trouble of having to open the finder window and do everything yourself.
Common options
The bottom part of the finder window contains options and buttons common to all the tabs.
Clear selection before searching causes the current thumbnail selection to be cleared when the Find button is clicked.
Move new selection to the top causes the thumbnails that match the search criteria to be moved to the top of their browser. For more information, see Move To Top.
