Requested Option to have a custom default filename pattern for "save as"

[poisonborz]

While happily using IV for years, one thing that was a minor, but constant annoyance: most often, I use IV to save images pasted from the clipboard. While IV always changes the default filename (incrementing ClipboardX), with each restart, the pattern starts from Clipboard01 again, thus ensuring that it will overwrite previous saved images. It would be so great to have an option to set up a customized default pattern (incorporating some differentiating element, like date/time or large random number). This could be also handy in other Save as.. scenarios.

[Sjef]

A nice request.
In the meantime you could make a custom to never again use the Esc-key to close IrfanView while working on your PC. In stead use the M-key on your keyboard (minimize). Than you have at least the advantage of the numbered filenames.

[Mij]

Single Convert/Rename feature

I have often toyed with the idea of requesting a "Single Convert/Rename" feature in Irfanview that would be capable of doing what this post requests as well as offering within the GUI what AdvancedBatch does as a Command Line option.

The idea is simple enough. The feature would take the image as currently displayed in the Viewer window (i.e.the contents of the DIB) and perform on it whatever operation is currently set up in the Batch Conversion/rename dialog.

If the Batch dialog is set to Rename only, the DIB, as it is, would just be saved in the selected format and location with the set name pattern. That name pattern can already include an incrementing number (with value optionally set to be remembered from the previous time of use). So that would cover what the OP wants to do, as well as what I would often like to do which is to readily save multiple stages during a complex editing process on a single image, so that I can revert back to any one of them later if desired.

I think that setting to Convert, with advanced batch options where required, would be valuable too. Often you would like to be able to perform a batch operation on a collection of images but some of them need a bit of manual pre-editing before the operation, a rotation or a crop or a colour tweak perhaps. With this feature you could just browse through the images in the Viewer, do the manual edit as required and then when ready use Single convert/rename to automatically perform the rest of the preset advanced batch operations on it.

It would of course require a new menu entry (probably in the Edit menu) to start it and ideally a shortcut key too (and conveniently Shift+B appears to be available).

Any other takers for a feature like that?

[jazzman]

Mij, could it be that that is already possible?

Help for the commandline feature says

/advancedbatch - apply Advanced Batch Dialog options to image (from INI file)

So, putting something like C:\Program Files\Irfanview\Irfanview.exe /advancedbatch into one of the four external editors might do just what you describe.

(Just an idea. I'm not a user of the commandline feature, experienced or other, so you would have to work out the details)


ETA: I don't think rename works for clipboard contents as it renames files. Also external editor(s) receive the file name as parameter - would /clippaste work here?

[Mij]

Hi Jazzman
Not so simple, I think. The full command line must be of the form

[path and file name for A] [path and file name for B] /advancedbatch /convert=[path and file name for C]

where A is the Irfanview program file, B is the original image file and C is the resultant image file.
A can be specified as a constant, but B and C are variables that have to be defined or computed each time before the code line can run.

We are talking about the case where a user already has an image displayed in Irfanview. The image may been opened from an existing file and may or may not have since been edited, or it might have come from the clipboard or a scan. Whichever Irfanview has some name B that it displays on the caption bar. In my suggested feature, C is generated from folder and name patterns that the user has set up in the Batch conversion/rename dialog. The user can choose whether C is derived from B, or be all new, derived from a mixture of fixed text and other variables such as Time/date or a sequential number. So the user decides what name will be appropriate and all the functionality for doing that is already there in the Irfanview program.

My scenario is that at some point the user just clicks a menu item or presses an Irfanview shortcut key and lets the program perform the same sequence of operations that it would do if it was running the Batch conversion/rename on a file, from the time when it would have been opened and expanded it into a Device Independent Bitmap of the image.

To run an external Batch program instead we would first need to launch the program (somehow) and pass it the name B. The program would then have to save the file temporarily in its present state before opening it again as part of the /advancedbatch command line. Any user choice about how to determine the name C has to be coded into the Batch program and the code to build the new name included too.
So I do not think it is a one line job.

[jazzman]

Did some testing with /advancedbatch and found that it will not do renaming. Even when the work as radio button is set to "Batch rename" the conversion functions are applied.

[Mij]

That is right jazzman. On reflection it would probably have been clearer to describe what both the command line option and the feature requests do, in terms of the Batch Conversion/Rename dialogs.

When you select Batch Conversion\Rename from the File menu you see the main "Batch conversion" dialog. The settings in the right hand half of that dialog allow you to set which files to open to perform actions on. In the left hand half are the settings to define what to do (convert, rename or both) and how to convert and/or rename the file. The command line option, AdvancedBatch, does not use any of the settings from this dialog.


If you have set an option that includes conversion and then click on the Advanced button below it, the dialog with the caption "Set for all images:" opens. It is only the operations on this dialog that the command line option, AdvancedBatch, reads and carries out. The file to be opened and the name of the file to be saved must both be in the command line itself.


The OPs feature request could be met by using the Rename settings from the main dialog (including those that can be set by clicking the Options button there). These are shown ringed below in solid line. Perhaps a new option "Save with Rename" might be added to the File menu to use those settings. My extension of that feature request would be to also allow those ringed in broken line to be set. That would then also allow the option to apply Advanced batch actions to the image before the file is saved.