GraphicExplorer 1.3 - User guide

First view of the progam

This shows the main program window, most of which should be familiar and easy to use.  You select a directory [folder] to work with on the left, then browse files in a list, which get displayed in the center of the window.

Some notes on this screen:

• You must double-click on a directory to select it: single-clicks have no real effect.
• Refresh any of the file-views by pressing F5 in them.  For example, if you have mounted a network area as drive Z:, select the list of drives and press F5 to reveal it.
• Once you have the directory you're interested in, you can press Ctrl-D to hide the list of directories, giving you more space for the pictures.  Press Ctrl-D again to redisplay the directories.
• The status bar at the bottom of the screen will always show the name of the selected picture, or selected directory.
  

View with the 'directory window' hidden

Browsing your pictures

Some information on the program's capabilites regarding photos:

The filetypes supported are: GIF and JPEG, as well as the various windows bitmaps (metafile, enhanced metafile, bitmap, icon.) This functionality is provided by the Microsoft Image ActiveX control, which means that changes to it are beyond the scope of this project.

PNG files are most notably not supported: this is a bug, but not one to be easily solved. Perhaps in future I will use an embedded copy of Mozilla to display such files, but this will depend greatly on the browsers each user has available.

In older versions of Graphic Explorer, filenames with upper-case extensions "myfile,GIF" were not displayed correctly. If this is a problem, please download the latest version*.

* In MS-DOS, you can "rename *.jpg *.jpg" to convert to lower-case, as the rename command is case-independant when reading, and lower-case when writing.

Browsing pictures becomes much slower when the file-list has to scroll down (e.g. when you're at the top or bottom of the visible list of files) -- if you have a mouse-wheel you can use this to scroll the list such that it displays files you're about to view.

Running a slide-show

In recent versions, GraphicExplorer developed the ability to show you the pictures automatically, without you having to select the next picture each time.  This section illustrates some of the ways you can use this feature.

Press F6, and the program will start choosing photos at random from the current directory, and rapidly displaying them.  This is the main slideshow mode, press F6 again to stop it.

If you look in the Slideshow menu, there will be an entry allowing you to change the options (see image).  You can choose to display photos in random order or directory order, and you can choose the delay between photos.

To search for a file, always display the files in order, as it makes it easier for you to go back and find a picture which just flashed past.  Your reaction time will be slower than a 0.7-second slideshow.

To advance the slideshow manually, just press Ctrl-N. Of course, you can simply put the cursor into the list of files and use the down-arrow!

Stealth Mode

Also known as panic mode: how to close-down the screen fast:

I don't know how useful this feature will be to people, but it seems possible that those at work will occasionally want to hide the fact that they're playing in a photo gallery rather than doing work.  Simply press F2 to hide the display.

A decoy 'batch-converter' will appear, making it look like you're doing valuable programming work.  The 'batching' is entirely random, and doesn't affect any files on your system; just sit back and watch the BlinkenLights.  Press F2 again to return to your picture.

Things you can do with a file

Select a file, and right-click on the file-list.  (Note: it does NOT automatically select the file you right-click on! )

• Open (you can also press Enter) : Open the file in the default handler for this filetype, i.e. the same program that would open this file if you double-clicked it from a directory window.
• Open With: Choose a program with which to open the file.  You will be given a choice of programs, and by default you'll start looking in "c:\windows\send to", which is Windows' own right-click menu.
• Once you've chosen a new program to open your files, that program will also appear on the "Open with programx" menu.
• Rename: Rename the file.  By default, this mode makes it easy to type a new name, but keep the same extension.
• Delete: THIS DOES NOT DELETE THE FIILE!!! : It moves the file to a recycle bin.*
• Move to folder: Move this picture to another directory [folder].  You can choose a (new) folder, the (parent) folder, to (browse) for a destination, or just use one of the sub-folders that are already there.
• Copy filename to clipboard: Copies the full path of your selected file, so you can paste it into a text-editor, word processor, or the 'open file' dialog box of any other program.
• Open folder in explorer: This just opens a Windows' view of the selected folder [directory]

* The recycle bin

GraphicExplorer does not try to use the windows recycle bin, however it does provide protection against accidentally deleting files.  It does this by creating it's own 'recycle bin' in the c:\temp directory (assumed to exist)

In the Tools menu, you have two tools for managing this recycle bin:

• Move to recycle bin: Display it's contents in the main window, which you can browse like any other folder
• Delete the recycle bin: Delete every file in this recycle-bin folder

For added privacy, you may find it more useful to open the recycle bin yourself and use PGP's file-wipe feature (or any other encryption-grade file deletion program)  

Other Tools

From the tools menu, there are various other tools which are explained in this section.

( There is currently not an 'Options' window; unlike many programs, I aim to create an interface which is usable without a whole screenful of fiddling with options. )

Create HTML Index

If you've used IndexDirectory, you might guess what this function does.  It will create an index.htm file in the current directory, listing each graphic file as an image.

When you open this HTML file in your browser, it will display each image in turn, as part of the page.

This can be useful when creating simple websites, although IndexDirectory implements a much more powerful version of this same feature.

Bulk rename

Suppose you have many files with weird names, and you want to impose a new naming structure on them.  You want pic001.gif, pic002.jpg, pic003.jpg, etc., or some such naming convention.  The bulk-rename tool does this for you.  Back-up your directory, click this tool, and an options window will open.

Type your choice of naming-convention into the 'filename format' field, and the 'Sample' text at the bottom will show you what a file might look like.  You can use a string-symbol, $ to include the old filename, which may be useful if you want to prepend a string to each filename.

For example "pic_$" might cause files to be named "pic_myfile.gif"

You can also include the hash character #, which will insert a sequential number into the filename, whose format will be chosen below.

For example "pic_#" might cause files to be named "pic_00004.jpg"

Numbering formats:

• 1,2,3
• 01,02,03 - This uses enough leading-zeros so that every file in the directory has the same length filename.  For example, if you have 1500 files, they would be renamed 00001, 00002, etc. whereas a directory with only 20 files would get names like 01, 02, etc.
• i,ii,iii
• I,II,III
• one, two, three
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd

Gather from subdirectories

Only choose this option if you have a lot of hard-disk space!  This tool will create a folder called "gathered", and put into it every single image file from the current directory, and each of its subdirectories.
If you have a directory structure, and you'd like to move it all into one place, this option can be very useful.  However, it does mangle the filenames, and take a lot of space, so I might drop this feature in later versions.

Editing Descriptions

Note: this feature does not exist in the version you have: this feature has not yet been released!

This program has been designed to be compatible with IndexDirectory, and one of the things both programs do is to allow descriptions to be attached to each file.

A description is simply a piece of text located such that it can be easily found if you know the picture it refers to.  See below for some more detail of how these descriptions are stored.

GraphicExplorer allows you to edit descriptions for each file you view.  IndexDirectory allows you to use these descriptions when you create web-pages containing these files.

Press Ctrl-L to get the descriptions box, an editable-box below the main photo,

If you browse to an image which already has a description attached, this will appear in the description box, otherwise the picture's filename is used.  You can type a new description and press Enter to save it.

When you press Enter, this not only saves the description, but also navigates to the next picture (or to a random picture, if you have slideshow set to random) : This allows you to quickly describe a whole directory without needing to move your hands from a typing position.

Press Ctrl-L again to dismiss the description-editor, and display filename information in its place.

Help and support

I hope this manual-page has been helpful: if you can think of any way to make it better, please contact me.

For questions about the program, requests for features, etc. you can either email me, or visit my website to see if any bugfixes have already been announced for your version.  


If you would like to edit the program, add your own features, etc. then the source-code is included with the main distribution.  Email the edited code to me if you'd like it included in the main distribution. Please read the GNU General Public License carefully before releasing your edited version.

New features

If you'd like to request new features in the program:

• Send some money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) -- I'm happy to write this code for free, but I'd like to be able to program in a world without corporate-sponsored restrictive laws on programming.  You can help create a better environment for the free software community by contributing to EFF's campaign.
• Email me a description of the changes you'd like, and attach a copy of EFF's thankyou letter.  
• I may write back a few times to confirm things, or reject any proposals which would not be in the spirit of this project, or of free software.

Email me

Thanks for reading!