Media & Folders Panel Layout on Startup

[moviemaker445]

Is it possible to alter the behaviour of the Media and Folders panel when IMatch starts so it defaults to the left hand side? I have many long folder names and currently, every time iMatch starts, the M&F panel defaults to a 'middle' view which hides the important left side of the folder tree. Please see attached image.

[Mario]

I think Windows tries to ensure that the very long folder name ending in ....(COPY).rtfd is visible.

IMatch does not intentionally scroll the tree control horizontally or anything. That's a Windows thing.
I could probably add a forced "scroll to the left" instruction to the tree control, but I wonder if this would negatively affect other users...? Then again, I doubt many users use folder names that long. Windows has a 254 character file name limit, and with folder names that long and maybe long file names and a few levels, the character limit can be exceeded quickly.

[sinus]

I know the problem, moviemaker445, and this is annoyning, true.

But moste of these folder, in my case, are folders from external with long names.
My simple solution for this: I do shorten the names. 

I do not know, if this would be possible in your case.

[Mario]

I've just did a test.
When a tree element (in this case, a folder) is selected, and the text length exceeds width of the tree control window, Windows horizontally scrolls the tree control to center the long text -  in an attempt to somehow show sufficient information to the user.
This is fully automatic. Whenever a item in a tree control is selected, the tree control internally calls "ScrollIntoView", which causes this behavior.

The only way to prevent this would be to tell the Tree Control to remove the horizontal scroll bar, but then you would be unable to scroll these long folder names into view at all. And that would be as bad or worse.

What I could probably do is once, after loading the tree state (and thus re-establishing the last selected folder) is to force the tree control to scroll to the left. But that would help only in that specific situation. When you later select the folder with the long name, the tree control would scroll again to center the text.

I think the best advise is to shorten the folder names by removing redundant or no longer relevant text.

[ubacher]

I have never used "Friendly Folder Names" but I wonder if one could create short "Friendly" folder names to avoid
excessive scrolling. Give it a try.

[moviemaker445]

Thank you all for your suggestions.
I think I will give 'sinus' solution a go and shorten the folder names. Will probably be the easiest solution in the long run. :-)
Cheers

[Uwe]

Hello,
the question is: what do you use the folder names for? If you manage your files in a DAM, the folder names should perhaps no longer play a role, as the information that may be contained in the folder name can now be described in much more detail as metadata in the files.
Regards, Uwe