Suggestion: action to set a filter & select results

General Discussion
#1

Hi

Thanks again for the great software.

Doing maintenance on my collection of 50,000 files stored on a NAS, there are maintenance action groups that I run periodically (e.g. copying ARTISTSORT to CONDUCTORSORT if CONDUCTOR = ARTIST and vica-versa, auto-generating a SOURCE tag from extended info fields, etc).
It would greatly simplify and speed up this process if we could have a special action to define and apply a filter, then select the results so that following actions in the group would be applied to that selection. I would envisage that you could intersperse this filter action with other actions in the group so you can set up a number of sequences to run on different file selections.

The benefits are:

  • actions don't need to be tested on huge tracts of files that they don't apply to, saving hours of watching the "Writing tag data" dialog (the big one)
  • or if you manually set the filter, you would no longer have to do this step each time then execute the action group, which is error-prone and feels cumbersome
  • the filter(s) would reside with the actions it is used with

Just a thought!

Thanks

#2

Just a basic problem:
An action can only be executed if a file is selected.
If you would have a filter in an action then the currently selected file could be one that does not match the then applied filter by the action.
So the file would not be selected any more and the action would stop.

Have you seen the features that allow you to

  • save filters by name and recall them
  • define combinations of actions and save this configuration

It is true that you have to apply both each time.

#3

@ohrenkino Thanks for your reply.

Current actions, yes, this is why I was suggesting a different type of action that itself would set the scope for actions that follow (recalling a named filter would be sufficient). It would clear or ignore any existing selection or filter, and reset the filter and selection taking its scope as the complete folder(s) currently chosen, then any following actions in an action group would act on those files.

I agree that the filter functionality has improved. I use action groups extensively.