Feature Request: Moving folders

Submitted by ddvfx on Tue, 11/09/2021 - 22:06
Forums: 
General discussion

I'm a big fan of FastRawViewer after exploring a lot of the features. There are a lot of no-nonsense practical tools here and the speed is amazing. My workflow for processing RAW files involves a lot of folder naming and organization. I can get by with sub-folder creation and rename folder functions, but a key piece missing is the ability to move an entire folder.
 
I know I can create a new folder and move all images to the new folder, but this negates a lot of the advantage of using in-camera folders like on a Canon DSLR.  I already have my images in folders after shooting, so processing involves renaming these folders and then sorting them into a new folder structure. In most other image organizing programs, I can drag and drop folders into each other or right click on a folder to move it somewhere. It seems like the building blocks for these functions exist in FastRawViewer for images and selections of images, but not folders.  Any chance this can be included in a future update?  It slows me down enough that the speed advantage of FastRawViewer is almost nullified in my workflow.

lexa

Wed, 11/10/2021 - 13:14

FastRawViewer is not a general-purpose file manager and no plans to implement it.

There are a lot of things that should be handled right when moving folders (for example: hard and symbolic links and special files including circular links) so even simple feature will become more and more complex after 1st implementation.



You may use context menu in Folder panel to open Mac Finder/Windows Explorer on specified folder.

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Alex Tutubalin/FastRawViewer team

ddvfx

Fri, 11/12/2021 - 18:35

I understand where you're coming from in that implementing features for *general* purpose file management opens up a pandoras box of features and bugs to fix to implement it right. That said, I think for the *specific* purpose of processing RAW images, folder movement is a must. 50% of my job is image file organization/processing, and I've never had a workflow that doesn't involve creating folders and sorting images into them. 
I don't think you'd need to account for symbolic links and special files...only moving a folder full of images and sidecard files produced by the camera and RAW processing software. If there were a warning that FastRawViewer cannot handle symbolic links, etc, I feel that would be fine? As far as I know, even Finder on Mac will break symbolic links if you move a folder...so it's not common to account for that.
If you're committed to not implementing it, that's your choice of course. I'm just letting you know that the lack of this feature is the only thing holding me back from recommending this app to others in my industry, and probably using it myself going forward. I process 1000's of images a week, and the speed of your app to read and QC the RAW images is unparalleled, but the speed gains are lost if I have to open Finder every time I want to move a folder.
Thanks for the response, and wish you the best with future development.

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