I have about ~20 rename presets - though I only ~regularly use about 4 of them in the actual rename dialog itself (as opposed to the rest being presets I use only from buttons without calling up the dialog). With that being the case, I could see a bit of value in some of what you've asked - and at the risk of hijacking your thread - would add a few of my own comments:
1.) To your request for a prompt to save/cancel when you click away from a preset that's been modified... I'd actually go just a bit further and request an actual "save" or "update" button for saving changes to presets. As it is now, we have to save a modified preset as a new preset with a different name, delete the original preset, then rename the new name back to the old name. Though I don't think most people ~need to do this often, it's still an uncharacteristically PITA task to carry out in Opus, and I would prefer an explicit save button to a save/cancel prompt. My personal reason for not digging the prompt method is because there are often (enough) times when I will select a preset, make some changes to see what the preview says the result would be - but then end up switching to a different preset. I'd find it annoying to keep getting save/cancel prompts in such cases... and would simply prefer an explicit "save" button to update a preset, which seems more consistent with how saving changes to other things across the app are handled. Not super passionate about this one way or another - but that'd be MY personal preference...
2.) Similar to how various items in Prefs can be marked as "hidden"... more than half of my presets are things I'd prefer to regularly have "hidden" from the list of presets displayed in the dialog... So, realizing that real estate is precious, and that I just requested a "save" button for updating presets, I'd still also really love to see some kind of "Hide" button up next to the Add/Rename/Delete buttons... though that would also drive a need for a "Show Hidden" toggle button though . Something like this would minimize the need I might otherwise feel to throw in with your first ask (thinking it would give me a more manageable list of presets to recognize at a glance which one is currently in use)...
3.) Would REALLY love a way to remove a file from the rename dialog or otherwise mark it as being excluded from the current rename operation... I will frequently have a fairly large number of files I would like to run a rename operation against, but then have a few specific files that I only realize I do NOT want to rename once they're loaded into the dialog and I've had a chance to view the results in the preview pane. As it stands now - I'm constantly either a.) running the rename against the whole lot of files, then going BACK and putting the old names back for the files I'd have otherwise excluded... or, b.) if the number of files I'd like to have excluded are just too many for me to remember which ones I have to go back and reset to the original name, then I have to cancel out of the rename, go back to the lister and try to be more selective of which files I include when calling up the dialog a second time. There are other ways I could help this out (like running a similarly structured SELECT filter to narrow down the file selection before running the rename dialog) but really, an enhancement in this area would be so much more natural for me to use, and I think it otherwise very nicely befits the combined elegance and power user approach of Opus on the whole...
4.) Still sooooooo want to see greater than 100 files displayed in the preview... if there's a good reason not to allow NO practical upper limit, then I'd arbitrarily ask for 500 if there needs to be ~some upper limit. But then, I'd also really like to have some RANGE like capability to the 'Select NEXT' command... so I could go through a series of actions like 'Select NEXT=500' -> Rename -> 'Select NEXT=500' -> Rename... or something like that.
These are great additions. I added a 4th in my list too, and happened to see you replied. Another one:
Allow the Rename dialog to remain Open and provide an Apply button. This way, you can use lots of presets quickly. This allows lots of little presets that do little things be called upon quickly. It is very time consuming to keep calling up Rename and scrolling the the preset list. Apply would make the changes, and update the file list with the newly named files.
That's what the Full Preview button is for.[/quote]
That sounds great Jon! I'm running v10.5.0.0x64 on Win7, but I didn't see a "Full Preview" button...? Until I went and looked again in one of my use-cases of selecting lots of files. So it's aware if a large number of files are in fact selected, and only then displays the "Full Preview" button. THANKS...
This is so obvious that I thought it must exist, but that I had not found it.[/quote]
...well, maybe it's there already and you just need Albator's glasses...
And yeah, I wonder why I had it in my head that I needed to save new, delete and rename to update a preset. Stupid... .
I would like to add a 5) point here, while we're busy.
Something I already asked about before.
While in "Regular Expressions" mode, have the down-arrow do exactly what one would expect it to do, open the history, which now can only be done by clicking the little arrow at the end of the "Old name" & "New Name" field.
[quote="MrC"]These are great additions. I added a 4th in my list too, and happened to see you replied. Another one:
Allow the Rename dialog to remain Open and provide an Apply button. This way, you can use lots of presets quickly. This allows lots of little presets that do little things be called upon quickly. It is very time consuming to keep calling up Rename and scrolling the the preset list. Apply would make the changes, and update the file list with the newly named files.[/quote]
That's the idea, but I'd use two buttons. 1. Apply, 2. Close, or alternatively, 1. Apply, 2. Apply and Close. Of course there still needs to be a Cancel button.
Oh gosh, please don't go adding unnecessary check boxes to that dialog... it's a very standard UI convention to have an "Ok" button that applies a change(s) and closes the dialog, and an "Apply" button that applies the change(s) but leaves the dialog open. Such as is used in Opus' Prefs dialog...
About "Apply" and "Skip" buttons
For me, I would expand the request here for an "Apply" button to tie into my previous request to be able to exclude specific files from the current rename operation. What I mean is, just as I would like to be able to 'exclude' some files already loaded into the rename dialog from the current rename operation... I'd also really want to be able to selectively "Apply" the current rename operation to some files but not all - leaving the rename dialog open. PRESUMABLY, if I've selected a list of files to rename, and see that some of the items on the list would be renamed to something other than what I really want if I were to just hit OK, then I might want to EITHER Apply the operation to the files that result in what I want - OR - Skip one or more files from the current rename operation.
The ability to do this from just a UI perspective is teasingly almost there. You can in fact 'select' a file from the list of files in the rename dialog... meaning, you can click on one of the files in the list and it gets highlighted in the way that is indicative of it being "selected". But no operation available in the dialog actually then ~operates against that seemingly selected file. I'm sure others just want a simplistic "Apply" such as has been asked for here. But I would really like to be able to:
a.) Make the current "Skip" and the requested "Apply" buttons able to operate against selected file(s) in the list. So "Skip" would skip the selected file(s) and remove them from the list and a new "Apply" button would apply the current rename only to the selected file(s). If there is no explicit selection, then the buttons would presumably operate like they do today...
b.) Allow multiple file selections (using standard keyboard + mouse conventions - Shift for range select, Ctrl for individual multi select) from the file list in the Advanced rename dialog...
My rationale is that I have many cases where - from the Preview of the rename operation I am about to perform - I can see that my intended rename isn't going to result in what I want for ALL files. With more refined control in the Advanced dialog, I would love to be able to go through a series of actions like:
many files selected and loaded into advanced rename dialog
potentially complicated regex does the job for MOST of the files selected, so may be I select EVERYTHING in the dialog, de-select the few that won't meet my needs, then hit a new "Apply" button
rename was applied to most of the files, I'd love for all of the those files that were just renamed by the "Apply" button to REMAIN SELECTED, at which point I might then hit the "Skip" button to get pop them off the list - leaving just the few that I might then handle separately, either in the rename dialog that's still open, or back in the lister.
Right now, the "Skip" button also causes the Old name and New name fields to be populated with the full string of the now topmost filename in the list (after the skip button pops the previous topmost filename off the list). That approach actually works fairly well for the use-case I just stepped through - where I might be left with a smaller number of files that I want to rename individually. But I would prefer those fields to keep the previous rename criteria that I had just applied to the initial set of files. Maybe I just might need to make a relatively small tweak to the previously used criteria to get it to "work" the way I'm happy with for the remaining files in the list. What WOULD make sense to me is if you were to double click on on a file in the file list - maybe THEN load that filename into the Old name (and maybe the New name) field(s).
Side Note: the Skip button currently only ever pops the topmost file off of the list. If I have one or more files that I want to Skip that are sporadically placed within the list... I want a more refined way of applying my changes or skipping certain files. The current "Skip" button behavior works in a weird enough way that I sort of fail to understand how it's even of practical use. There's actually a BUG here that I'll open a separate topic on.
Frankly, I have never used 'Skip' - have no idea about the use.
Bottomline for me:
If you have a list of files in the rename panel and you wish to rename certain files this way, some other files that way, you must then be able to select those files (whilst using shift/ctrl key) and do the renames.
The rename panel should not close, so one can perform the various rename steps, without having to select the files and re-open the rename panel.
+1 @ Steje
You described my exact feelings and whishes when doing mass-rename with reg-ex stuff!
Regex is not always forseeable when renaming hundreds of files at once. So having a look over the preview and being able to skip/remove entries would be kind of mega-powerful.
Right now, you need to remember all files which shall not be renamed, close the rename, recall ALL of those filenames (impossible) and deselect them, reopen the rename dialog and load the preset again. Then another "preview", another search through the list and then go for "OK", hoping to really have deselected all those files, which did not "fit" into the rename the first time.
[quote]My rationale is that I have many cases where - from the Preview of the rename operation I am about to perform - I can see that my intended rename isn't going to result in what I want for ALL files. With more refined control in the Advanced dialog, I would love to be able to go through a series of actions like:
many files selected and loaded into advanced rename dialog
potentially complicated regex does the job for MOST of the files selected, so may be I select EVERYTHING in the dialog, de-select the few that won't meet my needs, then hit a new "Apply" button
rename was applied to most of the files, I'd love for all of the those files that were just renamed by the "Apply" button to REMAIN SELECTED, at which point I might then hit the "Skip" button to get pop them off the list - leaving just the few that I might then handle separately, either in the rename dialog that's still open, or back in the lister.[/quote]
. Something like this would minimize the need I might otherwise feel to throw in with your first ask (thinking it would give me a more manageable list of presets to recognize at a glance which one is currently in use)...
.