# Browsing

Once you have annotated your images and videos, &kphotoalbum; is ready to let you browse through your images. If you compare that to fig-empty-browser-window , you will see that there now is items available in each of the categories for `People`, `Places`, and `Keywords`.

In the browser window you can see the categories you typed information into when annotating your images and videos. In addition there are items for searching based on EXIF information on images, browsing the folder structure of your hard disk, and of course showing the actual thumbnails. Lets describe each item in turn.

Pressing the mouse on `People`, the browser window will change, as you can see in fig-browser-for-persons.

## Browser window when People was selected.

The browser is now populated with the people you specified for your images and videos

You may notice that the item `Pets` has a special icon. For details about that, see sec-specifying-categories.

, selecting a person will bring you back to the original state for the browser. This time, however, we are in the scope of the person we selected. That means that we only show information about images and videos containing that person. See fig-browser-for-jesper below, which is the result of us selecting the Person `Jesper`, you can see an indication of that in the bottom of the window. On the lower right side of fig-browser-for-jesper, you will see that the number of matching images and videos has gone down from 25 to 13, while the total number of images stayed the same.

Note that if there are only a few images in the scope, &kphotoalbum; will directly go to the thumbnail viewer (see chp-thumbnail-view). You can configure this behaviour in the thumbnail viewer settings (see opt-thumbnails).

## Browser limited to the scope of the person `Jesper`

If we now continue selecting a new person, then we will get to the images containing both people. Continuing that way you can narrow the set of images that you have in mind down to a few images from a set of thousands.

When you are done limiting the scope of images, you may select the View Thumbnails icon, to see exactly those images matching your current scope.

## Adding Preview Images to the Browser

Looking at fig-browser-for-persons you will see that each person has the same icon in front of his name. &kphotoalbum; is actually capable of showing a preview image for each individual person

This of course also applies to places, keywords, and other categories you have defined yourself.

as can be seen in fig-imagesForPersons.

### Images for each Individual Person

To show images along with the names, choose the tool button to the very right of the toolbar, that will bring up a popup menu, where you can chose which view you want to use for the given category. Notice views must be configured for each category - that way you may for example use an icon view for people, but a plain list view for keywords (in case you can't come up with good images for your keywords).

It is, however, your job to tell it which images to use for each individual person. To do so, you must open the viewer (see chp-viewer), and from the context menu choose Show Category Editor, this will bring up the category editor which can be seen in fig-categoryEditor. In the category editor you choose the image for the given person. In the viewer it is possible to zoom to part of the image, and that way crop what part should be shown.

### Category Editor

## General image searches

If you chose the Search item in the browser, you will get to a dialog with great resemblance to the dialog you used for setting properties of your images. You can see this dialog in fig-search below.

### Search dialog

If you type a string in the label or description field, then that text will be searched for using substring searches. Likewise you can also specify a date to search for, either as part of a date, say 1971, or as a complete date. You may also specify date ranges, like 1971-1980.

The options item allows a very limited form of writing an expression, as you can see in the example in fig-search. Here we search for images with `Jesper`, but without `Anne Helene`.

The allowed operations are & (meaning: and), | (meaning: or), and ! (meaning: not).