Portable external applications?

[invisifan]

I keep any portable applications that I find useful installed on a USB drive (which naturally includes Irfanview) and some of them (for Text, PDF, graphic-fine-jpeg crop/rotation, etc..) are things I would like Irfanview to be able to call as external applications, however there does not appear to be any way to configure IV to use them without specifying a full, absolute path, either in the hand configured by-ext section or in the general properties versions -- am I missing something?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It seems to be possible to edit the path to the external application. Have you tried that? Something like:

..\notepad.exe

[invisifan]

Tried that (all variations that I can think of); works for some other fields, but not here as far as I can tell

[Mij]

You can use the single period (.) or double period (..) in the External editor paths as shortcuts for Current folder or Parent folder but the Current and its Parent folder are relative to the Image being displayed not to the Irfanview EXE file.
So it is useful only if the Images are also on the USB drive.
For example I have a folder containing a portable version of Irfanview, another containing a portable version of Faststone image viewer and one containing images all in a common parent folder on my USB drive, as shown in the first image attached below.
If I am viewing an image from that Images folder on the drive then I can send it to either the portable Faststone or the portable Irfanview on the drive using those External editor forms that you can see in the second attached image. Sadly if I am showing images from anywhere else then the editors cannot be found.



PS. You are right that sometimes the single or double period can be used to mean relative to Irfanview as in the file list for a slideshow for example. I think it depends on whether Irfanview or the Windows system are evaluating it.

[invisifan]

Ouch ... ok I suppose that isn't exactly a bug -- but it does make external applications next to useless for a portable version of Irfanview ...