Location of associative filter files

[iBaloo42]

Hi Mike,

Every software is built upon relevant use cases. I totally agree that the current Qimage implementation satisfies real needs of many people that are your, probably, "targeted market segment", people that are organizing event albums, professional photographers, or people that are selling their work through print labs.


However, I also suggest that Qimage should/could be targeted to amateur photographers, which I am one of.
Many of these photo amateurs are organizing their photos using folders, or a wide range of pseudo-DAMs (e.g. XnView, FastStone, Luminar, Lightroom, just to name a few) or real DAMs (such as iMatch, Photo Supreme). One common thing about these all these tools is that they are allowing "open with" from within their own environment for one or more photos that are selected.

Personally, I'm using iMatch, XnView, FastStone, and even the regular OS browser to open images for a given purpose, including for printing.

Qimage allows currently opening a file using "open with". If this is an unintended scenario for Qimage, a defect, I suggest that you disable it; but if you are doing this, I assume that you would leave money on the table this way, as many people would not consider buying the product, or your customers that already have the product would be simply outraged. However, if you keep it in, I think that you should take care of it from end-to-end, including being truthful to the message from the Enhancement/Filter Application panel of saving the associative file where the file was opened in the given session.

The same goes for Qimage sessions that are being created by doing a drag-and-drop from a external tool or OS browser!

As a (suggested) solution, when someone opens a file using "open with" or through drag-and-drop in Qimage, Qimage should open a temporary "one file album", like is being done today, shift the "Folders (click to open/close)" to the newly generated ...\Plugins\Export\... folder, and mark the given Qimage session that it should save the associative files to the real location where the file came into Qimage working session. That would include all the files that might be added to the given sessions from all kinds of unrelated folders through drag-and-drop.

I don't think that this should be too difficult to achieve...

[iBaloo42]

I also think that in the situation when the file is open in Qimage using "open with" or through drag-and-drop, the "Output folder" for "Create New Images" in the Enhancement/Filter Application panel should also be set to the folder where the file was originated from.

[admin]

It's really not that difficult (or complicated).  The location of the image(s) you are opening is shown immediately above the thumbnails.  If you are in an "Export" subfolder, the location of the images is the Export subfolder: if you open an image from there, you are opening an image from that Export subfolder.  Therefore, the associative filter message is always correct since it stores the flt file in the same location as the image you just opened (the Export subfolder).

Now when sending images from other programs, there are other considerations.  If you open a File Explorer window or other similar file-browsing software, select some images, and right click "Send To, Qimage Ultimate", QU will use those images from their original folder without using an "Export" folder because it knows you sent them from a file manager type program.  But, if you use something that deals with opening files (rather than just browsing), Qimage cannot access the files from their original location because they are likely open in another program: this is why it must create Export subfolders!

Consider an example of having 5 images open in Photoshop: test1.jpg through test5.jpg in a folder C:\photos.  When you use the Photoshop plugin to send images to Qimage, Qimage cannot open test1.jpg through test5.jpg in their original C:\photos folder because: (a) Photoshop already has those images open and you'd get an access denied error and (b) you may not have saved the images after editing them so even if you could open them, they wouldn't have the edits you just made in Photoshop (the edited images you have open in PS may not exist in any folder yet).

So just familiarize yourself with the scenarios where you are exporting vs opening in Qimage and everything will make sense.

Regards,
Mike

[iBaloo42]

I think that somehow, I failed to get across my message.

I'm not using the Qimage "export" folders at all. In my workflow approach, I don't want to go to this folder. These don't exist for me, and based on my workflow, I should never have any use for them. Actually, I think that the "export" folders should be more of behind the scene of Qimage, and not exposed to end users, but I might be wrong as I don't know where these requirements came to you from.

The location of the image(s) you are opening is shown immediately above the thumbnails.

The image attached shows that if I'm opening a file from a given location, using "open with" or through drag-and-drop, the source folder is not showing up above the thumbnails.

Qimage cannot access the files from their original location because they are likely open in another program: this is why it must create Export subfolders!

True, this might happen when the print is invoked from Photoshop, and I understand your reason for creating a copy behind the scene, but not everybody is working out of Photoshop, as I already made the point in the previous message that I've posted. I'm sending the file to Qimage from sources that are not locking the file for editing.

I'm repeating again, for me the original file location is still not the "Export" folder; the associative file should be saved in the original file location, so when I am opening it again, I should not have to crawl through the cryptic (cryptic because under the Export folder is just a bunch a date/time folder names) in order to find its associative file.

So just familiarize yourself with the scenarios where you are exporting vs opening in Qimage and everything will make sense.

No Mike... I don't want to familiarize myself with "Export" folder-thing... Again, from my standpoint, it should not be even be exposed to the end user...

[admin]

Then we are indeed talking about two different things!  Qimage will not create an Export folder when using "Send To" from another application... unless you ask it to:

Open QU and select "Edit", "Preferences", "When Images are Dropped into Qimage Ultimate" and select "View in Thumbnails" or "Add to Queue".  If this option is set to "Create Copies in New Export Folder", then... that's what it'll do.  You probably want one of the other options:

- Add to Queue: the sent images will appear in the live view as prints (at whatever the current print size is).
- View in Thumbnails: the sent images will appear (in their original location) in the thumbnails.

Note that if you typically open/send multiple images from multiple/different folders, you would use "Add to Queue" since only the queue (live view) can hold images from more than one folder and the thumbnails can only show one folder at a time.

Mike

[iBaloo42]

Mike!!! Excellent!!!  We are almost there.

Now I get what I need, but with one exception. In the case that I want to take advantage of the excellent upscaling capabilities of Qimage, the Fusion interpolation algorithm, and save a TIFF file, then in the Enhancement/Filter Application panel, the Output folder for the Create new image option should be set to the location where the original file was opened from.
Right now the Output folder is retaining the last location I've manually set in the last session when this option was used. Is there a setting to resolve this one as well?

[admin]

As long as I'm interpretting the question correctly, yes, that can be done: select all text in the "Output Folder" field and delete it to make that field empty.  If it's empty, copies are saved in the same folder(s) as the original(s).

Mike

[iBaloo42]

That's it, Mike!
We can consider this issue as closed.

Thank you very much for your help!

[admin]

You're welcome.  Glad we were able to stick with it and find a solution.

Regards,
Mike