Any chance of progress on this? How can I easily open a full version of of RT from an “open with” or as an external editor called from some other program on a Windows 7 machine (and presumably Win10.)? There is no easy way to add a -w -R switch to such a command. Or if there is, I sure don’t know it. And even if I could, the resultant behaviour is not particularly satisfactory. If you have a currently running version of RT and then you call “rawtherapee.exe -R filename”, it doesn’t open the file in the currently running instance, but rather it spawns a duplicate instance and opens the file in that second instance. And this takes a while.
The reason I bring this up now is that I just discovered that on the Mac version of RT, it behaves sensibly. That is, there is no -R option. As far as I can see the no-file-browser mode doesn’t seem to exist on the Mac version. “open with” RT or calling RT from another program opens up the full version of RT and it doesn’t spawn a second instance if one is already running. So it can be rather quick to respond.
Anyway, in my opinion it would be great to have the windows version mimic the behaviour of the Mac version. At the very least rawpedia should be updated to reflect the current situation. (Reload, Remote or Running?, differences between OSs etc.)
Win 7 64bit 5.6 RT. “Open with RawTherapee” in right click menu on files in Windows File Manager does open RT in File Browser mode. “Open with” then choosing RT in sub menu list when right clicking file opens in Editor (no file browser) mode as happens when I send an image to RT from a third party application (image catalogues).
I would like to thank everyone for their responses; they have been useful. I am now getting the same results as Peter (mannikon) – “Open with RawTherapee” opens in File-Browser mode but it opens in no-file-browser mode when called from another program. (I had to uninstall all of my old versions of RT and then reinstall RT 5.6 to even get this behaviour).
I have not tried editing the registry for two reasons. Firstly, I have no experience with editing the registry. It looks straight forward, but I don’t want to learn the hard way that it’s not. And further, I think it’s totally unreasonable to expect an average user to do this to get a desired behaviour. Secondly, I have been unable to obtain the desired behaviour by launching RT from the command line. I have no idea how “open with RawTherapee” does it.
I guess I’ll just leave this issue at this point because I can live with the current behaviour; it’s just not what I would like. And the fact remains that it works just fine on the Mac version.
I’ve read the github threads and I find them very interesting, but at the end of day, I’m still not sure what the current status is. Is it still an evolving issue or is it, for all intents and purposes, finished?
@bobm - my reading of that github discussion is that there are differing schools of thought and that it remains a topic which one day might be resolved (easy for me to say as a non-dev). I would like to see the non-filebrowser mode have a Prefs button and a filebrowser button which would open the same instance of RT where you currently are but if that’s tricky to achieve so be it.
Editing the registry can be dangerous but following the screenshot above would not be likely to cause any problems. From the Start button, type in regedit in the search box, when it opens navigate to where the screenshot shows, right click the Standard as per screenshot (mine shows Default) and modify as per screenshot then close regedit.
I have never touched the registry. It looked straight forward enough but I had a couple of concerns. Firstly, the path in the example didn’t correspond to the directory structure on my computer. My path includes a version number, i.e. \Program Files\RawTherapee\5.6\rawtherapee.exe. Secondly that location on my computer already contained some garbage referring to RT version 5.1 which has been uninstalled. So given that combined with the fact that I didn’t believe it would work anyway – based on your comments and my inability to get what I wanted from the command line – I decided the safest thing was to leave it alone.
What I am looking for when I call RT from another program is to open the file for editing in an already running instance of RT so that the response is relatively quick and I want o be able to make use of the template defined on the “Que tab”. I have auto-start checked so that when I am finished with my edits, I just hit “put-to-que”, leave RT and return to my other program (Photo Mechanic in my case). And as I said, I get that on the Mac. I’m just not set up for serious editing on the Mac.
Well, it is now almost a year later and the issue still exists. However, now I am running RT5.8 under Windows 10. My registry is consistent with the entry shown several posts above – that is, the -R flag is set. If I right click on an image file, I am presented with the option to open with RawTherapee. If I choose that option, RawTherapee opens in a full-fledged instance as advertised. So far, so good. However, if I now right click a second file and choose open with RawTherapee I get a second full-fledged instance instance. And also for a third file, etc. I do not believe that this behaviour is consistent with that described in rawpedia. It is certainly not the behaviour I want or need.
Is there any way to ensure that “open with RawTherapee” will make use of the currently open instance? Or is this a bug?
AFAIK there is no way to change this behavior. On the other side, right now, the history of changes is not yet saved. So if you are in middle of an edit and the window would be reused the history (not the current result) of the edit would be lost. I would not like this.
Thank you for your response. The potential loss of edits would not be an issue for my workflow, but for others, it could be. My issue with the current behaviour is the time it takes to spawn a new process. But I can live with the current behaviour as I have been.
However, the fact remains that, at least for Windows 10, the statement in rawpedia:
Using -R also allows you to open an image in an already-running instance of RawTherapee, if that instance was also started using -R .
is incorrect. (And I have verified this by using the command line directly rather than just indirectly via “open with”.)
Just as an aside: @bobm I think the reason this issue has gotten little to zero attention, is that for most (?) users opening files from Windows Explorer is not the common workflow. RawTherapee has an internal thumbnail browser that can / should be used for this purpose. It allows you to open multiple images in multiple tabs, just as you want.
So despite the unexpected behavior, the question could also be: why do you want to open from Explorer, instead of browsing from RT?
I second @Thanatomanic view about opening files in windows explorer. You can also open a folder by right clicking, That is more handy if you want to process a series of photo from that folder.
could you test if the -R option works if you add gdbus.exe in the rawtherapee folder (alongside rawtherapee.exe) gdbus.zip (20.2 KB)
Actually, I don’t want to open a file from windows explorer; that is just the easiest of confirming what is going on. What I really want to do is open a file in RawTherapee from Photo Mechanic
I use Photo Mechanic as my file browser and metadata editor. My commitment to Photo Mechanic is perhaps even stronger with the current beta release of Photo Mechanic Plus with all of its powerful database features.
Anyway, after developing my raw files with RawTherapee, I browse the resultant jpegs with Photo Mechanic. If I wish to make a small adjustment, I want to be able to call RawTherapee from within Photo Mechanic. I need a full fledged instance of RawTherapee so that I can export a jpeg directly and I wish to avoid the delay inherent in opening a separate instance of RawTherapee each time I call it.
My issue is somewhat similar to the recent discussion about Opening RT from IMatch. It was this discussion that triggered me to revisit this issue after it lay dormant for almost a year.
OK, so I added gdbus.exe alongside rawtherapee.exe and then the -R flag seems to work as described in rawpedia. That is, I can edit multiple files sequentially using “open with” in Windows explorer or called from within Photo Mechanic without generating multiple instances of RawTherapee.
So, I’m happy. Thank you. But should I still open an issue in github as suggested by @ChasingShadows?
Thank you for testing
If you don’t mind I will open the issue to warn the windows builders to add this exe in windows builds.
Alongside I will correct the windows build page in rawpedia.
I’ve been curious about this behavior in Linux, and in Linux Mint 19.3 (Ubuntu 18.04) opening a raw file from the file manager (not the RT file browser) opens a “no-File-Browser” window, and opening another image without closing RT first, launches another instance of RT.
Is there any linux «gdbus.exe» alternative, so we can do the same as @bobm?
