Here’s a dirty little secret: I’ve been interested in a control surface for photography half of forever (Loupedeck…yum). The idea of having a slider or a knob to adjust exposure, structure, and so on just makes me drool. However, because I’m a dedicated ON1 RAW user, those dreams are just that — dreams, because ON1 RAW doesn’t support any of the control surfaces out there, Loupedeck, Tangent, Modular, etc. I know this because I’ve done (ahem) extensive research. One nit: hey ON1, it’s not cool that you can’t suggest features unless you have the latest version of the product. I don’t mind paying for each successive version, but come on. Anyhow.
I’m also a big fan of automation in general — scripting, command keys, whatever it takes to save some time, especially for things you do all the time. If I could script unloading the dishes, I would. 🙂 So, how has my quest for automating ON1 RAW gone? Abysmally. I’ve tried Hammerspoon, Quicksilver, Applescript, Keyboard Maestro, just to name a few. All were failures. I was about to give up until I discovered Better Touch Tool. (Fair warning: it is not free.)
This little gem not only allows you create your own command keys, but it allows scripting recording relative mouse position. Why is that important? You see, if the application doesn’t provide hooks for a scripting language to use, then all you have is the mouse. If you can relate the mouse to the app through relative mouse position (from last click for example), then you can — if the application is good enough — get to those dialog boxes and menus. Is Better Touch Tool good enough? Yes, yes it is.
So far I’ve been able to create command keys for two of the more time-sucking things out there: selecting the edit button, and deleting multiple photos. The first one involves going to the edit button, clicking it. Now, I just do Apple-shift-E and I’m editing the photo. No more need to scroll over and click. You might be thinking, big deal, Mike. It is a big deal when you have to do it hundreds of time for each trek back from the outdoors. But that’s only the beginning.
For some reason (safety I’m guessing), ON1 RAW doesn’t allow you to select and delete multiple photos. To select each photo, then for the group, right click, scroll through the context menu, click delete, and confirm it — this was a massive time suck. Ugh! I did find out that ON1 provides an accelerator key for delete in the context menu, though. That made this next trick possible. Now I select the photos to delete, press Apple-shift-tilde, and bam, all the selected photos are deleted. (ON1 RAW, the 2019 version, doesn’t have a catalog manager, so deleting a file here deletes it for good.)
Long story short: Better Touch Tool is fantastic, especially for ON1 Raw users. It also has the longest trial period for any software I’ve ever seen — 45 days!
All this opens the door to getting a dedicated keypad, which would allow me use a single keypress to trigger the key combos — external key 1 maps to Apple-shift-tilde which maps to the delete selected photos macro in Better Touch Tool. Maybe there will be some X-keys in my future?
whoiscall July 30, 2023
Thanks!