Grouping

Grouping pictures

One of the most important features for advanced import profiles is grouping pictures. WIA-Loader tries to form groups from the images to be imported, which can then be used, for example, to tag images or to save the images of a matching exposure bracket together in a separate subfolder.

The following grouping options are available:

By shooting time

Groups are formed from images that were taken shortly after each other. The maximum time span allowed between these images can be set in seconds.

By day

A simple variant of grouping by shooting time: a new group is formed for each day.

By metadata

This lets you group images based on their EXIF data.

For example, this setting can be used to group images that belong to an exposure bracket, if your camera has a bracketing feature:

EXIF field 37380 contains the exposure compensation set for the image. The condition 'ascending' causes consecutive images to be grouped as long as this exposure compensation value keeps increasing.

By similarity

With this option, WIA-Loader uses an algorithm that tries to group images that look similar. This is still experimental!

Manual

No automatic grouping happens here. Each image starts out in its own group, and the user can assemble the images into groups themselves during import.

Editing groups

During import, the groups found by WIA-Loader are shown once more, and the user has the opportunity to edit them further:

In this view, images can be moved into other groups by drag'n'drop with the mouse. In addition, groups can be named and/or tagged with keywords. If you have created AI Configurations, you can use the context menu here to have the images tagged automatically. This view is virtualized, so even very large numbers of images can be displayed and edited smoothly.

These values are then available as variables for the following import steps. The variable names can be changed on the 'Variable names' tab, so that several grouping steps can be used together within one import profile without conflicting variables.

The default variable names are:

<TGROUP> : The number of the group the image belongs to
<TGROUPPICTURE> : The number of the image within its group
<TGROUPNAME> : The name of the group the image belongs to

If keywords were assigned, they are available through the variable <TAGS>.