Many of my client jobs involve reprinting some of their images from earlier projects. What I find convenient is to copy shortcuts to the original images into a new job folder so I don't have to go searching around for the original images later. Most applications (e.g. Photoshop) will open a file from a shortcut. Qimage seems to be an exception. It would be very useful if Qimage would handle a shortcut to an image file.

Thanks so much.

Cheers!

Brad

Hi Terry. The QU auto job log is really great for retrieving a specific previous print job, i.e. the files, the sizes, orientations, printer, profile, rendering intent, etc. and I use it all the time for that purpose. For my business, that's one of the strongest features in QU. It would be even more powerful if it was searchable (from within QU)--but that's a different issue.

No, what I'm talking about is a different problem that also comes up quite frequently and that is building a new job from a number of images to be found in a number of different folders, which may or may not have been printed before, but need to be printed as a job now. This is where the shortcuts come in. With windows (or other tools that I use, e.g. ACDSee Pro), I can easily search and find the images across all folders and then easily create a new job folder of just the shortcuts to the images.

However, if I open that folder of shortcuts in QU, there are no files displayed. QU doesn't recognize that the shortcuts point to printable images. That same folder in ACDSee Pro or Photoshop or Windows does show me images that I can be opened and work with. What I'm asking that if there are shortcuts to images in a folder, that QU also handle them as if the image files were actually in the folder.

Cheers!

Brad

There is another use case where shortcut support would be very handy--dragging and dropping files into QU. Again, outside QU, it is often easier to search and locate files to be printed. E.g. using Windows search tools to create a set of search results, you can then drag and drop image files from the search results right into QU's print preview area and presto! the images appears and can be printed. But it doesn't work with shortcuts to image files.

Cheers!

Brad

I realize there can be a lot of ways to "skin the cat". I think of shortcuts as leveraging the operating system's  natural "album" feature, with all the benefits of searching, app launching, etc. that go with it. Heck, even Microsoft has formalized the idea with Libraries in Windows 7.

Keep in mind that not all my jobs involve printing images with QU although most do. So while QU is very important to me, it isn't the control point of my workflow. For me, the control point is Windows itself and ACDSee Pro.

My main application for shortcuts is fairly simple. For every client job I do, I create a separate folder for it. In that folder, I save the relevant files for the job. Those files could include a proposal, a quote, an invoice, all files submitted by the client to me, the raw scans I have made, the final work products (PDFs, InDesign files, Illustrator files, PSD, TIFFs, etc.) However, many jobs incorporate files from previous jobs. I don't want to duplicate those files into the new job folder, but I still want them in the new job folder where it is more convenient to work with them as part of the new job. So I create shortcuts.

Where it becomes a hassle from a QU perspective is when a client asks me to print them a complete portfolio of all the scans I've done over several years. This came up recently and it involved 20 files over 2 years--not to be printed as they were originally (e.g. large on canvas for stretching) where the auto job log would be perfect, but on different paper in a different size format to fit a portfolio book. Using Windows search or ACDSee Pro, I can locate these files very efficiently and create the job folder. Getting QU to process that job folder of shortcuts is the use case.

Cheers!

Brad