Custom folder view based on folder content in Directory Opus

Directory Opus has the option to display files differently depending on which files are in a folder.

Let’s say you have a folder with a bunch of pictures. By default it will look like this:

Viewing pictures in Directory Opus in “detail” view.

To set it up, let’s first activate “Content Type detection”:

Go to Preferences ➜ Folders ➜ Folder Behaviour
Enable Folder Content Type detection for all local and network.

Now Directory Opus will pay attention to the type of files that reside in a folder. But it doesn’t know how you want to display each folder. This is why we need to edit the Folder formats.

Go to Preferences ➜ Folders ➜ “Folder Formats“.
Under “Content Type Formats” you can see a list of default “Folder Formats“.
Make sure “Images” is checked and double-click on it to set a custom view for a file type group.
Go to the Display tab and set the view to Thumbnails.

Next time you enter a folder with pictures, Directory Opus will display the files as thumbnails because it can detect the majority of file types in the folder.

Here is an example.

Adding more file types

If you want this to apply to other file types too, such as RAW and BMP files, you can do that by adding these file types.

Go to Settings ➜ File Types
Select the Images group and click on Edit.
Click on the drop-down button you can see all the file extensions that are included in the Images group.
Add a new file extension to the group. For example, .raw or .bmp.

In theory, you could also make a completely new format, just for RAW pictures by adding a new file type group.

This will let Directory Opus view ARW files as image files and therefore display them as thumbnails. 😀

Content threshold

You might be thinking “what if I have a folder with mixed content like pictures and documents?“.

Good question 😂! This is where the so-called “content threshold” comes in.

The content threshold sets the percentage of how many files of a type a folder should have to activate a certain folder format.

For example, if a folder contains 75% of image-type files and 25% of other files, the images folder format will be activated, if the threshold is set to 75%.

You can change this threshold for each folder format.

Preferences ➜ Folders ➜ Folder Formats ➜ Double click on a format ➜ Options (tab) ➜ Content Threshold
Adjust how much of a file type group the folder should contain for the custom view to kick in by changing the precentage.