In some cases, it's still good to know and understand, where XnView stores its settings. Below you will find various info on XnView's settings.
Where are settings stored?
XnView will store its settings in .ini files or in the Windows Registry. In the "About" dialog XnView Classic and XnView MP both show the location of your settings. In XnView Classic choose "Info > About" or in XnView MP "Help > About" to see. Here you'll see either a valid path or something like "\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\XnView\". The latter indicates that your settings are stored in the Windows registry.
How to control location of settings?
XnView Classic: The place where your settings are stored depends on the option "Save options" which you can find by selecting menu
"Tools > Options", category "System integration".
XnView MP: The place where your settings are stored depends on the option "XnView settings" which you can find by select menu "Tools > Settings", category "Integration", tab "Paths".
A - Settings stored in .ini files
By default all your XnView settings/options are stored in two files:
- xnview.ini
- bookmark.ini
bookmark.ini contains the bookmarks that you can set using the toolbar in the browser ("New bookmark"). xnview.ini contains all the rest, i.e. setting of options, recent file and directory list, ... If you want to have the same settings on another PC or want to make a backup of your settings, it's sufficient to copy the two .ini files.
Location of .ini files
The setting "Save options" (see above) also controls the location of the .ini file:
- * User - User's Application directory
* Program - Program directory of XnView
* Windows - Windows directory
Resetting XnView to default settings
XnView has internal default settings which are used if no settings file or registry entry is available. If you want to reset all your settings to back default, just delete (or rename) the "xnview.ini" file. Please note that your bookmarks won't be deleted, since they are stored in a separate file "bookmark.ini".
B - Settings stored in Windows Registry
If you have activated the option "Use registry to save options", all the XnView settings will be stored in your registry under the key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\XnView" and you can use "regedit" to export and import the settings. But this is for advanced PC users, only.
Settings and XnView update
When updating XnView, you typically uninstall your current version and then install the new version.
The two .ini files 'xnview.ini' and 'bookmark.ini' which are used to store the settings and the bookmarks of XnView, are not part of installation and deinstallation and will not be changed or deleted. So when updating, the settings will be untouched and won't be lost.
Editing settings manually
The .ini files are normal text files which can be opened using any text editor. All settings stored in the .ini file can be changed using XnView's option dialog ("Tools > Options"), so normally there should be no need to edit and change the settings manually.
Editing .ini files can be done, but when doing so each user should know what he/she does and it's at own risk: Normally XnView is forgiving, but in rare cases wrong entries might even cause GPFs at start-up. Make sure that you exit XnView before editing the settings manually, otherwise your changes will be overwritten by XnView when exiting.
Related topics
Where does XnView MP store its setting files on a Mac?
