This can’t be that hard, but I thought I’d post this first before spending an hour wasting my time figuring it out.
I have digital camera pictures in one folder (we’ll call it “A”). I open them in Photoshop, crop them, then want to save them into a different folder (“B”). Is there a way for me to get the program to automatically open the folder (“B”) when I click Save As to save the file, rather than (I know, I know) clicking all the way to that folder each time?
Eh, :o
Thx.
BoneyK
You’d think MS woulda figured that out by now. A simple Open/Save As default folder. I’m pretty sure there isn’t one, but if there is, I’d be VERY happy. EVERY day I make an excel worksheet for work, and everyday, I have to navigate to where I want it.
The closest thing I can tell you is to put a folder in your My Documents Folder and save them to there. That way it’s only a click away from the default (make sure you folder name starts with something that will keep it at the top of the list) and you can move them all at once to wherever you want them.
You can do this easily with an action.
To create the action, do this:
Open any image file.
Go to the “actions” tab. (If you don’t see it, go WINDOW --> SHOW ACTIONS.)
Click the “Create New Action” button on the bottom of the tab. (It looks the same as the “Create New Layer” button – a dog-eared page.)
In the “name” field, type “Save as .gif” (Or whatever format you want to save it as.) You can assign a function key for one-button access later – say, “F2” for now.
Press “Record”
Go back to your document and save it as a .gif (or whatever) in the folder you want it to go in.
Go back to the “Actions” tab and press the “stop” button.
Forever after, if you press “F2,” whatever document you’re working on will be saved as a .gif in whatever folder you specified when you created the action. (If you don’t want to specify a hot-key for some reason, you can always just select the action and press “play” in the actions tab.)
I love actions.
Like Larry, i was gong to recommend an Action.
Another possibility, depending on what format you’re saving them in, and what sort of information you need, is to use the “Save for web” option instead of the “Save as” option.
“Save for web” will save them as jpg files, and (i think) also strip out any exif data, so if you want a different format or to keep the data, it might be no good. But it does remember which folder you saved to last, making it easy to save multiple files to a single folder.
Application developers could do this with the tools MS have provided them with, if they cared about it. Even standardize among themselves… (hehehe, yeah right, like that’s going to happen.)
But yeah… speaking as someone who’s developed software using the ‘common dialog’ open/save as routines… it’s a very simple command to tell it ‘start in this folder.’ Any application developer could build a routine to have it specify a default folder from another menu item, or pull from a common folder, saved in the registry.
But I don’t think there’s been a real need seen for that sort of thing. Make your voice heard, let the software companies know! 
I have had a real need for this for 20 years. I used to take advantage of Novell’s MAP command to set up a single letter which represented an entire path. This option isn’t available in Windows, AFAIK, and SUBST at the DOS level is inadequate.
The Action command only works in Photoshop, right?
I frequently open a bunch of files from one folder and want to save them after processing to another. The only universal shortcut I have found is storing one of the paths as a clipboard text string. I believe there are aftermarket routines that allow for multiple clipboard storage locations, but Win has only one by default.
I can’t speak to the Photoshop issue, but for Excel is there some reason why setting the “Default file location” property on the General tab in the Tools > Options dialog wouldn’t work for you?
I agree it’s frustrating. A simple workaround I’ve used is to differentiate between Source and Edited files within one, single folder, rather than use different folders, during the editing session. I do this with a special prefix.
So…
Take all your files. Move them into Folder B to start with. Using any photo-archiving utility, rename them all with a prefix such as ‘Org’ (for ‘Original’) or ‘Src’ (Source) or ‘xxx’. I can do this using Nikon View or Fotostation, I’m sure lotsa other apps can do it too. So now you have xxx001.jpg, xxx0002.jpg and so on.
Open file. Save As with its new name or just remove the prefix. So xxx001.jog becomes 001.jpg. Edit to your heart’s content. Save. Repeat for every image.
At the end of the session, go to Explorer, select all the files that still have the xxx prefix and move them to Folder A.
Proabably cuz I never knew it was there. I’ll check that first thing Monday morning.
ACTION = AWESOME
Thanks, this works great!
On a similar note, you can customize the list of icons on the left that you see in the open/save dialog – called the “Places Bar”, I think. By default, it shows the Desktop, My Documents, My Network Places and some other junk.
You could replace it with custom folders that’ll be one click away in any application that uses the standard Windows open/save dialog.
If you’re interested, use TweakUI on the Microsoft PowerToys page to set it up.