Index your NAS and USB drives

Fast offline access to any kind of storage

With ImageRanger you can index the files on your NAS or USB storage drives and later browse them even when your NAS is disconnected or USB is detached. You are able to search, filter and quickly sort your files.

Here you will learn how to setup and use the file index with automatic face recognition, keyword tags, file ratings, etc.

Indexing files for fast photo and video search

Once your files are indexed you can sort, filter and search them on Mac or Windows.

We assume that you can access your external storage using normal file system access. (In other words, that you can browse your files with a system file explorer, be it on Windows or MacOS.)

When you open a folder with ImageRanger using the Browse panel on the left side, the files in the selected folder and subfolders start to appear on the screen. The indexing of these files is automatically performed on the background, but is done only once for each file. This is because software needs to gather a lot of information such as detected faces, capture dates and locations, keywords, ratings, etc.

For big file collections the indexing process may take little longer. The indexing progress is shown on the screen. Although indexing has to be performed only once, there are settings which help optimize indexing performance for your needs. It is possible to turn off face detection, setup the multi-threading for higher CPU usage, etc.

Once the files are indexed, all information is reused automatically next time you open the same folder. This means you can open your storage folder anytime after the indexing and access fast sorting and filtering for all the images located on your storage drive.

Distributed Indexing: one storage, multiple clients

How to index your files once and re-use the index on all computers.

What if the location of your files is frequently changing? For example, you access the same USB drive on two different computers and you want to be able to quickly sort and filter images on both machines?

By default the ImageRanger software builds the index information on your local storage in some temporary folder. Hence in default configuration the fast-sorting and filtering functions are available only on a single computer. To change the default setting, use the Options menu and set the Distributed index location.

When distributed indexing is configured, ImageRanger will write a small file inside each folder, where index information about images are cached. This makes it possible to reuse the indexing results on other computers, without doing the indexing again.