Getting started

7. Galleries

Bring your picture sets in, and link them to any of your scenes.

x4u shows sets of pictures as galleries, in rows that fill the page without cropping anything. Bringing them in takes no importing: x4u finds them in your library's folders, the same way it finds videos.

Galleries in x4u: each set shown by its first picture, in rows the width of the page, with its name and how many pictures it holds.

What counts as a gallery

A folder with four or more pictures in it. Fewer are left alone: a poster or two beside a video isn't a gallery.
A zip of pictures (.zip or .cbz), with any number in it. x4u reads the pictures straight out of it; nothing is unpacked.

JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF pictures are shown. Others (HEIC, AVIF, RAW and the like) are left out for now.

Bringing galleries in

Put them in a folder x4u already hasAnywhere inside your library's folders will do: beside your videos, or in a folder of their own.
Or add the folder they're inIn Settings → Folders, add the folder that holds your picture sets. It needn't hold any videos.
Wait for x4u's next lookx4u looks through your folders when it starts and every hour. Galleries then appears in the sidebar (on a phone, among the Library's tabs), and thumbnails are made in the background.

x4u only reads your pictures. It never changes, moves or deletes them. Change a gallery on disk and x4u lists it again at its next look; move or delete one and it goes from x4u.

Linking galleries and scenes

A gallery can go with any number of scenes, and a scene can have any number of galleries, wherever each is kept. A scene's galleries show on its page, under Pictures; a gallery's scenes show under its name. A gallery that goes with just one scene is called by that scene's title.

Links are kept against the video's fingerprint, so they hold when you move or rename the gallery or the video. There are three ways to make one:

In x4u. On a gallery's page, choose Link a scene and search for it. Or on a scene's page, choose Add a gallery under Pictures. The × beside a scene on a gallery's page unlinks it.
By the gallery's name. Put a video's fingerprint in the gallery's name, in square brackets, and it goes with that scene wherever it's kept:
```
Pictures/
  Summer Shoot [a1b2c3d4e5f60718].zip   ← goes with that video's scene
  Two scenes [a1b2c3d4e5f60718] [0f1e2d3c4b5a6978]/   ← or with several
```
The fingerprint is on the scene's page, under File: click it to copy it, brackets and all.

By keeping it beside the video. As a first guess, x4u links a gallery to the video it sits with: one with the video's name, or one in a folder that holds just that one video.

Videos/
  Summer Shoot.mp4
  Summer Shoot.zip        ← this scene's gallery

Winter Shoot/
  video.mp4
  photos.zip              ← this scene's gallery
  behind the scenes/      ← and this one
    a.jpg …

A link you take away isn't made again, whatever the gallery is called or wherever it sits.

An open gallery: its pictures in rows the width of the page, with the scene it goes with under its name.

Looking through one

Pictures come in the order of their names, read as people read them: 2 before 10.
Click a picture to see it over the whole window. ← and → (or a swipe) go through them, Home and End jump to the first and last, and Esc, a swipe down or the Back button closes it.
Photos taken with the camera turned are shown the right way up.
Search galleries by name, or sort them by newest, name or how many pictures they hold.