It would be very nice to include a command line option for PhotoLab that indicates “open this folder” so one could, for example, add a right-click option to Windows File Explorer (and other OS finders) to “Open with DxO PhotoLab 4” – resulting in PhotoLab starting with the selected folder open.
For example, the following Windows registry file might help to illustrate:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\PhotoLab4]
@="Open with DxO PhotoLab 4"
"Icon"="C:\\Program Files\\DxO\\DxO PhotoLab 4\\DxO.PhotoLab.exe"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\PhotoLab4\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\DxO\\DxO PhotoLab 4\\DxO.PhotoLab.exe\" \"%1\""
You might want to make the command-line option be more precise, in case you wanted to add others in the future. For example,something like:
Interesting, not on mine. I’m opening UNC names (network shares that look like \server\photos\folder). I’m not on my Windows photo-editing machine, right now, but I’ll give it a try with a local drive pathname and see if that works.
Hmmm… I know I typed a double forward-slash, I wonder if the forum used it as an escape? But then the other forward slashes would be missing from the rest of the path example…
Regardless, I noticed in the screenshot you posted that you were right-clicking an image file inside of a folder, while my experiment was right-clicking a folder, not a file. When I use an image file as the right-click target, on a local disk or on a file share (via a UNC path), both work. So that’s a reasonable way to get to a folder, despite not being obvious.
If you implement the registry entries that I provided in my first post, PhotoLab does not attempt to open the folder supplied to it by the right-click. I’ll take a look at the “open a file” implementation in the registry that results in PhotoLab opening when a pathname+filename is supplied to see if there’s something special about the command-line syntax. If there’s nothing special about the syntax for that scenario then I suspect that PhotoLab simply does not know what to do when presented with a path/to/folder on the command-line as opposed to a path/to/file at the command-line.
NOTE: the location in the registry to open a file is different than that used to open a folder. I created a registry entry for opening a folder, in order to see if it would work. Not knowing if there was a special command-line syntax, I used the “common” approach to just supply the pathname as the first argument to PhotoLab, on startup.
I looked at how the file type registry entries work, they use the same command-line option that is added to the PhotoLab desktop shortcut, adding the "%1" argument that is needed to capture the filename that is right-clicked:
Unfortunately, providing a folder name in the "%1" position does not result in starting PhotoLab in the right-clicked folder; PhotoLab just starts in the most recently used folder, and ignores the supplied right-click folder name.
@DxOStaffPO – seems like the easiest way to meet this feature request would be to:
Allow a folder to be provided with the “openwith” command-line argument.
And, add a registry entry, like the following, as part of the PhotoLab installation:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\PhotoLab4]
@="Open in DxO PhotoLab 4"
"Icon"="C:\\Program Files\\DxO\\DxO PhotoLab 4\\DxO.PhotoLab.exe"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\PhotoLab4\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\DxO\\DxO PhotoLab 4\\DxO.PhotoLab.exe\" -mode=openwith \"%1\""
.