Is there any reason why pixinsight won't show thumbnail preview pics in its file Explorer?
The File Explorer window includes a resizable thumbnail, a histogram preview, and metadata information, including basic statistics, image geometry and color space, as well as FITS keywords when applicable. This works for all supported file formats and all PixInsight project files and bundles. You can right-click the thumbnail to configure it, including its dimensions, automatic STF settings, and cached data.
File explorer allows you to open any image or set of images in PixInsight. You can double-click a file or drag a file or set of files to PixInsight's workspace. You can also drag folders and sets of files to tools that require file lists, such as ImageCalibration, ImageIntegration, StarAlignment, etc. You can also drag a file or a folder to any place on a tool where these items are required. Besides this, File Explorer allows you to navigate your local filesystem in a safe read-only mode, which you can disable temporarily to perform common actions such as copying, moving, deleting and renaming files and folders.
Normally File Explorer is docked as an auto-hide window at the left side of PixInsight's main window. Hover the File Explorer vertical tab to open it. If it isn't docked, select
View > Explorer Windows > File Explorer from the main menu.
is there any reason to save files as Xsif as opposed to Tiff.
There are dozens of reasons. The fact that XISF is the native file format of PixInsight is just one of them, and not the most important one. See the
XISF resources page for more information.
As for TIFF, this format is unable to provide even a minimal support for the data and metadata that we have to store and manage in PixInsight. Its support is maintained just for compatibility with legacy data and applications.
As we continue implementing more functionality and capabilities in PixInsight, XISF will become more important because it is the only format able to implement most of the new features. For example, in an incoming version of PixInsight an XISF file will be able to store the complete processing history of an image, which will be a crucial feature. This is impossible with other formats.
