Don't know for sure. It's there by default, so I left it there. If it ain't broke...

This ignore pattern feature has some bugs... off to the bug report discussion.

I believe that pattern is there to exclude files that have extensions, but no names. You're not going to see files like that on your PC, but on most web servers, you might encounter them, and they're there to do things like controlling directory access (like the .htaccess file). So, if you're running JAlbum on a server, you want to skip over those kinds of files. I would think that JAlbum would ignore them, in any case, but better safe than sorry.

Well, yes, obviously, ...unless you're going to run JAlbum on a server where it might encounter those "nameless" kinds of files. In short, there's no harm in leaving it there, but in most typical user environments, it's not going to make any difference either way.

Only the programmer would know for sure. Like all such things, there is, of necessity, a limit to the size of the string it can handle, and to the size of the array that stores the list of things to ignore, but you'd need to see the source code to nail it down.

The purpose of the

(\.|_)

portion of the 'ignore pattern' is so that JA doesn't process any files that a begin with a period (dot) or an underscore. This is not only because some people run JA on a server. Mac/Unix systems reserve filenames beginning with period (dot) for system files. They're all over the place, but they are invisible to the user (though not to software, of course). One wouldn't want JA to think of those files, that may be hanging around an input folder, as "images" to process. From the early days on, JA had the convention of ignoring files that began with '_' (underscore) as a way for skin authors and users to have files in the input folder (such as .mp3 files or .jpg files that were only used for folder thumbnails, etc.) that shouldn't be processed by JA as 'images'. Now with the new Edit tab function that allows users to exclude files on a case by case basis, this is less necessary, perhaps.

Following on from the discussion of the use of the "|", I have created a batch file that excludes a folder, using the console mode command line -ignorePattern panoramics. This works OK.

However, if I try the same text as in my actual project file

-ignorePattern=(\..*|panoramics)

or the simpler example

-ignorePattern panoramics|mark

it doesn't work.

Any ideas anyone? How would you exclude 2 folders when using console mode?

Cheers,

Mark

David,

Welcome back!

Thanks for the 2 pointers. I'll try the 1st ....

As for the 2nd, that obviously means more jap files .... and the reason for me going down the batch file route (using a single base jap file and command line tweaks) is that I was having problems keeping the many jap files updated with the latest Chamaleon updates . But I appreciated the workaround tip, thanks.

Mark

Re-visted in 2012

Even though I remember using quotes before without success (see Ignore Pattern & Console Mode), it's worth adding to this thread :

I re-tried the use of quotes to surround the argument, and now I find it works OK. For instance, to build an album excluding movie files, I used the Console Mode parameter

-ignorePattern ".*\.avi|.*\.wmv"

which does indeed exclude .avi and .wmv files.

Similarly,

-ignorePattern "AVI|WMV"

excludes folders named AVI & WMV.

Mark