Photo Downloader

[BillRogers]

I just bought a new PC that runs Windows 7. I am using Bridge and PS CS5.1. The photo downloader in Bridge will not "remember" my settings from one ingestion to the next. I used CS5 under Vista and XP without this problem. Any ideas? Thanks ...

Bill Rogers, Johnstown, PA

[BillRogers]

For what it's worth, I spend 45 minutes on the phone with an Adobe tech this morning, and he insisted that it was "normal behavior" for the Photo Downloader to "forget" settings with each download.

Problem solved, however. I just use Bridge CS4's photo downloader for ingestion, then switch to CS5 for processing.

Bill

[R. Neil Haugen]

Ahh ... they "improved" the product, eh?

Clear back in Windows 3.11, you could create a macro and place it on the desktop ... say, open Excel, open "X" spreadsheet, update info from "y" source, choose this section of the page, send to printer, save and close Excel. I had a number of these massively time-saving little macros on my desktop, and I wasn't a particular clever computer user ... still aren't. "Amn't". Whatever.

But those macros disappeared from "obviousness" in Win95, though the capability was still there IF you found out how to use a "pif" file, and created a pif file in Notepad including the proper language for the macro. However, Win98 eliminated such pif-file use in toto. Since then, to do what we'd been ABLE to do in the older Windows, we've had to do it each step by hand. To do that which ... back in the dim mists of PC-time, I could do with a double-click of the mouse ... I now need to open Excel, tell it to update the source info, and print this section of the page, then close Excel. Or whatever else I had set up to auto-run.

I finally called up Microsoft tech support a couple years ago to ask about this ... and got (first) a young man that insisted Windows had NEVER been able to do that, first saying he thought it was a stupid idea and who would ever have used it ... though finally admitting it was "probably" a useful tool but he'd never heard of it. He passed me up to a second-level techie, who was puzzled at the question, then realized he'd once READ something about the previous existence of "macros" but had no personal experience, so HE passed me up to a woman who's probably as old as I. On hearing my question, as to why such a time-saving (and seemingly obvious computer-type) tool was no longer available, she thought a moment, and then realized that yea, she'd also had several macros on her first machine, also running Win 3.11, and yes, it was a WAY COOL feature. But of course, she wasn't working at Microsoft then, and didn't know why system-wide macros no longer exist. She took my number and promised to get back to me with information on this.

Never heard back from her.

And you know, writing scripts for IdImager or EM2/CM is so much more complicated than the old macro language was ...     

Neil

[Roger Spencelayh]

Neil,

Possible being older than you (I go back to before the IBM PC was invented), I do remeber the macros you talk about, and whilst the Windows version was dropped, there is an alternative called AutoHotKey which will run mouse and keyboard macros. So if you do still want to write system-wide macros, that could be your answer. Whether it will ease wrting macros for Id Imager or EM I have no idea.

Roger

[R. Neil Haugen]

Thanks for the comments especially about AutoHotkey ... will need to look that up.

Those old simple to write, simple to use macros in Win3.11 were a joy for me. SO much easier than scripting something 'new' in most other programs.

Neil