Contact sheet from text file

[Bob M]

I suspect that I'm out of luck on this one, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I'm running PM+ version 6.0, build 6890 on Windows 10, but I don't think that is particularly relevant to the question.

Is there anyway that I can populate a contact sheet from a list of file paths in a text file?

Here's the problem (issue) I'm trying to solve:

All of my photos have a consistent, unique filename: yyyymmdd-nnnn (year, month, day and four digits).  The path to a particular file is archive/yyyy/mm/dd/yyyymmdd-nnnn.  My catalog comprises these and only these files. A particular photo is either a raw or a raw/jpeg pair; no naked jpegs.

In addition, I have jpeg copies of some these files stored at, for example, flickr/,  facebook/yyyymmdd/, photosets/yyyy/yyyymmdd/, website/yyyymmdd/.  In this way I keep track of how I have used my photos and have backups if they were ever to need replacing (in that use).  (I set this system up before PM+ appeared).  This works fine and suits my needs but it is quite wasteful of storage space and I'm short of internal storage space.  I would also like to be able to search based upon my use of images.  Thus what I would like to do is to store the information on the use of these photos as keywords in my archive copy of the files (and thus in the catalog) and then I can erase all of these satellite files without loosing information. (I can regenerate replacement jpegs as necessary but to date I have never had to do this.)  But I see no non-tedious way of adding the keywords to my archive files.     

Suggestions?  (My question re the text file is based upon using the text export tool to generate a list of paths to the archive version using contact sheets populated with the satellite files.)

[ahoward]

No, it's not possible to generate a Contact Sheet from a text file. There may be a way to accomplish what you are after that is less tedious than what you have considered thus far. I'd be happy to discuss it on a phone call, as it would probably require too much back and forth on the forum.

[Bob M]

My preference would be a little back and forth on the forum first.  (If I were in the same time zone and if it were a toll free number, I would be more inclined to use the phone.)  I think I am quite knowledgeable about PM's features so if you could just suggest some general directions for me to investigate, that might be helpful.

In fact I have made some progress on this, but I'm not there yet.  (Actually, I think I have hit a road block).  I used text export with the header: "filename", body: " {filebasename} or" and footer: "zzzz", with "Replace Carriage Returns ..." checked.  (zzzz is a dummy filename so that I don't end up with a trailing 'or').  Here is a sample output file based on the contents of an non indexed directory:

 filename
 10c-3337 or
 20b-2154 or
 20160822-043 or
 20201219-0001 or
 20201219-0015 or
 20201219-0023 or
 20210102-0002 or
 20210102-0003 or
 20210102-0005 or
 20210102-0008 or
 20210102-0012 or
 20210115-0001 or
 20210115-0002 or
 20210115-0005 or
 20210115-0008 or
 20210115-0016 or
 20210116-0004 or
 20210116-0005 or
 20210116-0011 or
 20210116-0013 or
zzzz

If I now paste the contents of this file into the search box (in the organizer tab), it indeed opens up a contact sheet populated with those files (raw/jpeg pairs in most cases).  And these files are located in various different indexed directories.  This is almost what I want.  However, this example involves 20 different filebasenames.  If I expand it to 25, it fails.  I guess it doesn't come as any great surprise that there is a limit to how many 'or's you can string together but I was hoping for a larger number.  Perhaps this is something that a simple software change could fix but then I guess the questions is: is this a bug or is it some unique esoteric change desired by a single individual?  Or perhaps there is some other way of expressing the query that might allow a longer list? Comments?

An aside:  I was expecting that because I had checked the "Replace Carriage Returns Line Feeds ..." checkbox that the output file would be a single line, or at most three: one for the header, one for the body, and one for the footer.  Instead each file name was on a separate line.  So I went looking for documentation of the text export dialogue.  As far as I can see, no such documentation exists and that strikes me as a deficiency.  Maybe the thinking is that it is so simple that no documentation is needed, but the lack of documentation caused me a certain amount of frustration in my trouble shooting.

If i did a search and replace for \r\n and replacing it with nothing, that indeed it reduce the file to a single line.  But it doesn't seem to make any difference with respect to the search.