# What Is The Pixie Browser?

The Pixie browser is the main way you use Pixie. It provides a browser for viewing all your images with persistant thumbnail previews, the capability to move, copy, delete, or rename files or otherwise manage them with the HotList or FileList, viewing images in one of four different ways, and many other features such as batch effects, converting images, playing a slideshow, etc...

The Pixie browser.

### The Thumbnail Browser

The thumbnail browser by default is displayed on the right of the window and displays all the files in the current folder. It supports persistant thumbnail previews of all your images using a fast demand-loaded preview engine, so it is efficient for browsing your images no matter if you have just a few dozen or a few thousand images once the previews are generated.

### The File Management Tabbar

Located on the upper left corner of the window is the File management tabbar. It contains a directory tree that you can use either for selecting which folder to display in the browser or drag files to folders to copy, move, or link them. It also contains the FileList and the HotList, two of the features Pixie has to help you manage your images.

### The Image Preview

On the bottom left corner of the window is the Image Preview. When you single-click on an image in the browser it is first previewed in this window. Double-click the image to view it full sized. The image is only loaded once so this is efficient, (using the image preview won't make Pixie any slower).

### Moving Different Components Around

Because of KDE's excellent "Dock Window" support, like many KDE applications such as Konqueror you can move around or remove the different parts of the Pixie browser. Each of the above items is a "Dock Window", and has a stippled bar on top of it along with a close button. To move a part of the Pixie window click on the stippled bar and drag it whereever you want it to go. Pixie will automatically display preview rectangles of how the window would be laid out if your dropped the component in a given area. To resize a component simply click on it's frame.

You also can drag a component out of Pixie's window entirely. It then becomes it's own window independent of Pixie's main browser window.

If you select the close button it removes that part of Pixie from the browser window. This really only makes sense with the Image Preview and can be useful if your selecting multiple files. It can be annoying to have previews generated when your trying to select many images so closing the Image Preview window will prevent this from happening. You can get this, or any other component you closed, back by using the "Windows" menu.

Pixie laid out with a large image preview.

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