I’m a brand-new Directory Opus user. I haven’t bought my licence yet, because — besides needing to scrape together the money — I wanted to fully get to grips with it before committing to it for good. And today, that’s finally done .
I’ve known DOpus since its Amiga days, when I used it very happily. Now, on Windows 11, the one thing that gave me the courage to push through DOpus’s industrial-scale number of settings was the painfully slow Windows File Explorer, which, in my opinion, is one of the biggest bugs Microsoft has never managed to fix. Maybe there’s hope with the upcoming K2?
Anyway!
After spending two days configuring absolutely everything, I’ve finally managed to recreate all my old habits. Here’s a screenshot of the result.
On the left: Windows File Explorer + Open-Shell, which until now had been absolutely essential for me. On the right: my new DOpus environment, configured so that I can keep all my usual file-management habits while losing none of the features that Open-Shell gave me.
I’ve stepped into a whole new world, and damn, does it feel good!
Now, before people start thinking I’m being paid to say all this, I do have one criticism: it’s still impossible, within a Folder Format, to define thumbnail width and height separately — thumbnails remain square — even though this distinction is available in the general thumbnail settings.
So now I’m eagerly waiting for the slightest Directory Opus update…
That’s it!
Note: please forgive my school-level English — I’m a Frenchman from France.
Indeed, it would be nice if Directory Opus had a thumbnails view similar to a masonry layout (instead remain square) for viewing image one day.
However, it's not a must-have, so I'd never actually submitted it as a formal feature request.
(like this)
edit:
Honestly, I'm not sure what this design style is even called, so the sample layouts I found above maybe weren't quite right—probably not "masonry layout."
What I'm actually looking for is simpler: the window split into fixed-height rows, with images of different widths filling each row.
But anyway, DOpus isn't a dedicated image viewer, if it meant adding new libraries and bloating the software by 1MB, it's just not worth it.
There are different renditions of masonary but support is being considered for all major browsers - Photos is probably using electron (aka css/js).
Native CSS Masonry is not yet fully supported across production browsers, but the Web Standards community is actively resolving the final specification. MDN Web Docs - Mozilla
— I wanted to fully get to grips with it before committing to it for good. And today, that’s finally done 
.
On the left: Windows File Explorer + Open-Shell, which until now had been absolutely essential for me.
On the right: my new DOpus environment, configured so that I can keep all my usual file-management habits while losing none of the features that Open-Shell gave me.
Frenchman from France.
.