Importing a list of files

[CanyonJim]

I have a program used to manage several thousand photographs stored in a variety of folders scattered across multiple drives.  The program catalogs the images and allows selection of images by many different criteria and can create ordered sets of images.  It would be very helpful if I could either drag and drop the images from my application to P2E, but so far all attempts have failed.  I can drag and drop to several other applications using a FileDropList format, but P2E apparently doesn't recognize that format.  I tried using the older and more complicated ShellIDList format and got it to work dragging to Windows explorer, but couldn't get it to work with P2E.

It is possible to drag and drop files from Windows Explorer to P2E.  Is there any information on what format P2E is looking for from the drag operation?

While drag and drop would be my first choice for importing files, I could easily enough create some sort of file with a file list and import that into P2E, but I can't find any indication that P2E can do that.

Any help would be appreciated as I'll be creating many slide shows and importing the individual files manually will be a pain.

...Jim

[Barry Beckham]

If I am reading your query right, I have to say that maybe you're not going about this the right way. One of the first and most important disciplines when making slide shows is to copy all the images and sound files into a dedicated project folder. They need to be in one place and dragging them from different locations on your computer will almost certainly end in tears..

Once you have the files copied to a dedicated folder, open PicturesToExe, browse the file tree for that folder and the images will appear. Select them all with Ctrl+A and drag them down into the slide list at the bottom. 

[CanyonJim]

Thank you for your reply, Barry.  I'm sure that is good advice for projects where the slide shows are the primary objective, but in my case archiving, researching, cataloging and sharing historical photographs is the primary objectives and creating slide shows is only one way of sharing images.

Organizing the images on disk based on the slide shows in which they are contained is not appropriate and is also not practical because the same image will often be included in multiple shows.

The metadata for images changes over time as research identifies more information about the photos and the people and places in them and the dates they were probably taken.  It would be difficult to keep multiple copies of an image up to date if they are scattered around in several different locations.

We also annotate some images identifying the people in them, etc.  Changing those annotations when new information is discovered would entail copying the new image to multiple locations.

We create ordered image sets in our software for multiple purposes, only one of which is creating slide shows with P2E.  It is a duplication of effort to then have to regenerate each set in P2E.

...Jim

[jkb]

Jim, you can drag'n'drop from windows explorer to PTE.

Just open up an explorer window, open PTE9 & then drag from explorer & drop into the slide view in PTE.

You can do multiple images at once by selecting them in explorer first.

Jill