I have a large collection of image files on a (networked) computer other than the HTPC (running MC) on which I wish to display a slide show of a (small) subset of these images. I use a different image database application (IMatch) on the other PC. This application has a database with all kinds of tags and I can select the subset of images I would like to display. This subset contains images from many different directories on the other PC. It can then produce a text file with the names (including full paths) of the images. Is there a way to add these images to the MC library from this list?
I tried creating IPTC tags in the image files on the other PC and then importing the whole set of images to MC's library, but it took forever and MC eventually bombed out. Then I could have selected the (small) subset via MC's image tag selection. There are about 500,000 images. Is this too many?
I realize that I could just copy the files, but even though the number of images is small compared to 500,000, there are still several thousand. I would like to avoid doing this if I could. And it could create problems if I ever wanted to edit any of these images, to keep the original and the copy in sync.
Or does anyone have any other ideas?