How to Filter Photo Files

Introduction

BatchBlitz enables you to filter photo files either interactively or non-interactively. In both cases, the filtering will be done on a collection of files that you selected into the Source Images list.
 

Do Filtering Interactively Using the “Filter Files” Dialog

The Source Images list may contain files that should be excluded. To remove these files from the list, just click button on the Source Images toolbar. The Filter Files dialog will then pop up. See below:

In the above dialog, you define a Pattern that will be searched on the Name or Location of each file. Option matched is selected so that matched items will be marked as excluded (indicated by a gray background). Now you click button Filter and all matches get marked.

You can hide all the excluded items by checking option Hide excluded. A pair of numbers (8/12) is displayed in the dialog caption indicating the number of non-marked files (8) and that of total files (12). In the above case, 4 files have been marked as excluded and will be removed from the Source Images list if you click OK.

Do Filtering Non-interactively in a Batch Task Using the “Filter File” Action

In certain cases, you may choose to do the filtering in a batch task. The Filter File action is for these cases.

Just add one or more Filter File actions to the Actions list. Files excluded by any Filter File action are skipped and will not get processed by subsequent actions.

In the demo batch task shown above, two Filter File actions are defined.

Note: only the first one has its Active option checked. The second one is seen as inactive. Only active actions will be executed when the batch task is started.

For a simple tutorial on managing batch task, click here.

To edit properties of an action, just double-click its name or icon. The below image shows the Action Properties dialog for the first Filter File action. 

The dialog shown above lets you set the filtering conditions (or rules) for the action. 

An image file is excluded if specified conditions in the filter are met. Otherwise, this file is said to have passed this filter. Then, subsequent actions, if any, will get performed on the file.

 

For more tutorials on using BatchBlitz, click here.