Hi! I saw this a while ago and thought it was pretty neat, I'm only trying it now due to the linux version (thank you so much).

Anyway, I wasn't sure how it worked so I picked a test-folder as my directory and now Impart is trying to index 35,000  .gd script files which seems like it's going to take over a day to finish.

The issue, however, is that Impart stops you from updating directories while tasks are running, and it auto-starts the indexing task upon startup. So now that I've told it to do this, I can't interrupt it or have it stop in any way. It's essentially bricked until the indexing is complete.

I find myself wanting to correct my misuse of the tool by removing the directory or turning off the recursive setting, which it won't allow until indexing is finished. If I had a cancel/interrupt indexing button, or if impart asked you to index as opposed to automatically doing indexing on startup, would let me fix what I did.

Also random question: I'm curious how the indexing and tags work. Is the program adding anything to my files, or just reading and remembering them locally within the application itself? Hopefully the ladder, but in this case what happens if I move or rename a file?

I'm also curious if it will grab the thumbnails out of .ora or .exr files, as I save a majority of my artworks out of my art application as opposed to exporting them.

Hey, sorry for the late reply, I meant to get back to this way earlier.

A cancel indexing button is an excellent idea! I'll definitely add that to the list for next update. I've got a few things in the pipe right now so hopefully I can find time to implement it and do a release at some point. On top of that, I'm now realizing it'd be neat to have some option to filter your directories to only index certain files. I might leave that for a future update though haha.

As for indexing and tagging storage, everything is stored in the app itself, Impart does not modify your files at all. Unfortunately, as you've guessed, this comes with the downside if you move or rename a file, Impart will not know that happened and just assume it's a new file, which means you'd need to retag it. There's a few ideas I had on how to fix that but I wasn't particularly excited about any of them:

1. I could make it so that impart listens for file changes, but for that to work, it'd need to be running in the background at all times
2. I could add the ability to rename/move files within impart, but I feel like that'd kind of annoying to have to remember to do that
3. If you move or rename a file, I could have impart simply guess if it's the same file. Possible, but very bug prone and could lead to some nasty surprises

Sorry, I'm just rambling at this point, I've been thinking about this a lot too but haven't thought of anything that's struck me yet haha

As for the thumbnail generation, unfortunately, the tool I'm using only supports specifically JPG and PNG. In terms of EXR files, it seems like there might be a tool I can use for that, but it looks like quite a headscratcher. I'm also having trouble finding anything about ORA files. I know there's also been requests for supporting PSD thumbnails, so at some point I might look into expanding supported formats, but I can't make any guarantees on this one. Sorry!

That makes a lot of sense! Kind of makes you wish for UIDs or something like what Godot/Unity use to track that exact thing, but I can't see that being a very practical solution for a tool like impart. I quite like that it doesn't generate or mess with files. I suppose having impart detect new files and letting you easily label them is easy enough to do, I doubt people change file structure super often.

 ORA is OpenRaster Image Files,  generally used by open source art programs (Krita, Drawpile, Gimp, MyPaint, Blender (for 2D images), etc, though photoshop and clip studio can also output them). Since it's an open format it shouldn't be too hard to look at it's guts since it's all documented on the web, I know that Deevad on Github has already made a ORA thumbnailer tool which if you're lucky might be compatible with Impart for you to just use and make the tool tremendously more versatile without needing to reinvent wheels.

Also huge fan of your art by the way. When I saw the thumbnail for this tool on itch I had to do a double-take, I'd recognize that rendering style anywhere on the internet/did not know you were a programmer as well. Very cool stuff!