[AfPhoto/Win] Open multiple images in proper order?

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[Old Bruce]

I hesitate to include this because I only know that it works on Mac, using Python 3. May not work on Windows and that is what the request is for. You may not have the same modules ... etc

It use a one + second pause, you may want to increase it. 

<rant on>  one of the wonders of universal cross platform scripting languages is that so very few of them are. <rant off>

Serial Photo opener 01.py

[R C-R]

Considering all the potential problems with these things, & that sometimes even 1 second delays won't be enough, I think it probably would be simpler & maybe even faster to just open the files in the normal way & then rearrange the tabs or windows manually.

[David in Яuislip]

Excellent work by @Lagarto

I think my own efforts arrive at the same conclusions. I would be interested if anyone with a very wide screen could see if a wide program window would achieve more tabs. This box usually runs at 1920 x 1080px but I also tried at the max 3840 x 2160 and it made no difference, still 14 tabs. Not being fluent in C++ I used the poor man's Powershell and was quite impressed. Forget the old bat files, I found it impossible to deal with spaces in filenames and to force the use of Photo 

LoadToPhoto.ps1

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[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

But an opener script can be very useful if there is frequently a need to edit something like 10 images in the order they are selected in File Explorer / Finder.

When would it be useful to edit that many images in the order they were selected (or listed?) in Finder or Explorer & then all opened at once? I think I would almost always prefer to just open them one at a time & very rarely have more than 2-3 open at any one time.

But that's just me.

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[David in Яuislip]

21 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

& "C:\Program Files\Affinity\Photo\Photo.exe" "$ChildItem"

Thanks for the comment. The quotes around the $ChildItem are not required in Powershell. The $List array elements contains the full path with any spaces and it works well. I was not clear, the comment was about my attempt with a bat where I had

for %%i in (*) do (
echo %%i
if exist %%~ni.jpg start %%~ni.jpg
if exist %%~ni.jpeg start %%~ni.jpeg
if exist %%~ni.png start %%~ni.png
if exist %%~ni.tif start %%~ni.tif
if exist %%~ni.tiff start %%~ni.tiff
powershell Start-Sleep -m 1000
)
exit

and no matter how I tried to use quotes it failed. Plus it's not possible to force the use of Photo so unless that is the default program, which it is not on my system, then it fell over. Another weirdo was, I have png set to open in Irfanview and pngs opened twice. I spent far too many heartbeats trying to get it to work, after giving up and migrating to Powershell it took about 30 minutes

[David in Яuislip]

21 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

If you are interested in improving the script

Thanks again, I'll try that stackoverflow link

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[Elise Kleve]

Hi guys, I just bought Affinity Photo today and I am trying to "convert" my Photoshop workflow to Affinity Photo's.

Let me know if this has been answered before:

I want to drag multiple image files into the layer panel but it seems that it is not possible?

 

I want to open multiple files (100+ images) as layers in AP. This is what I want to achieve:

 

[firstdefence]

@Elise Kleve Create a document the size you want and then drag the files onto that document.

[carl123]

4 minutes ago, Elise Kleve said:

I want to drag multiple image files into the layer panel but it seems that it is not possible?

You can't drag files directly to the Layers panel but you can drag them on top of an existing image/document and they will appear as separate layers

Alternatively, you can use File > New Stack then ungroup the stack once it completes

[Elise Kleve]

10 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Create a document the size you want and then drag the files onto that document.

 

9 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Alternatively, you can use File > New Stack then ungroup the stack once it completes

Oh, I see. Thanks for these information.

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[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, Lagarto said:

(I wrongly assumed that they get listed there alphabetically because the selection order of files was initially alphabetic.)

The python script I posted has to sort() the list of images before opening. Only then is the list alphabetic.

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[Old Bruce]

I guess I could modify the script to load according to file size, created date, modified date.

Regarding the 14 maximum number of open files before the tabs stop. I found that the size of the consolidated window as well as the overall size of the monitor played a role in this and I was able to get more than 14 tabs.

The desire to open and display files in alphabetic order was just a 'proof of concept' exercise for me.

There is something to be said for opening files as you want, in the order that they are listed in the finder or explorer window.

But.... That is a level of writing and testing I am not willing to do, partly because I can test on Mac OS 10.14 and 10.12 in python 3 only. No Windows nor any earlier versions of python.

I do wonder if perhaps symbolic links could be used/renamed to open in the order you want....

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

But as said, this order gets disrupted as soon as images from the sidelist are activated as on macOS they are placed at the first tab position, and on Windows at the last tab position. To retain the loading order, the whole tab sequence should be scrolled (similarly as e.g. in Photoshop), rather than single images inserted amidst currently showing sequence, but as this does not happen, the benefits of getting images listed in the order they are in Finder are rather limited.

Earlier I mentioned the same thing about the currently activated document being moved to the first tab position on Macs, & the 'almost' in order tab behavior too.

For this & other reasons I think the bottom line is the Affinity apps are not very well suited to opening large numbers of documents at once, but if they ever implement anything like this, it will probably be an after loading tab sort option that can be used at any time after all the files have loaded.

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[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

True. But as files do get loaded in the Finder / File Exporer order when they are loaded on canvas (and shown on the Layers panel), I cannot see why the same logic could not be used when loading as separate images: the images do get loaded very fast so whether multithreaded or not, the speed is probably not the user's primary concern.

When you say 'loaded on canvas,' do you mean placed in the same document's canvas one at a time or something else?

As for loading very fast, I think that depends on several factors, including file size & complexity & the responsiveness of the drive. For instance, my old Mac with a conventional HDD took far longer to load a large file (one with lots of pixels) than my current iMac with a very fast SSD. But even my current iMac can take 5-6 seconds to load a really large file like a jumbo sized 18Kx18K px tiff.

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[R C-R]

51 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Fastness is certainly dependent on multiple factors but usability (order wished by the user) first, other things second.

If the loading time is excessive, like for opening several very large files from a relatively slow conventional HDD, usability may be close to zero until at least the file one wants to work on first has finished loading.

This is why I suggested that the tab sort order might best be implemented as a post-load option.

If you think they always will load very fast, try loading a bunch of very high resolution tiffs or the like from an external HDD attached via a USB port. A good source for these is https://esahubble.org/images/ -- most full sized originals are reasonably sized but some top out at 400-500MB & like I said, even with my very fast SSD, it takes 5+ seconds for one of these monsters to load.

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