4.9 | 18 ratings Rate this file 155 downloads (last 30 days) File Size: 6.8 KB File ID: #10867

uipickfiles: uigetfile on steroids

25 Apr 2006 (Updated 20 Mar 2007)

Many-featured, platform independent file and directory picker.

File Information
Description	This is a GUI application that allows multiple files or directories to be selected and allows you to manage the list (remove files, reorder, etc.) before returning. It has basic filtering as well as regular expression filtering and navigation of the file system is easy. The output is configurable (cell, struct or char arrays). It is written entirely in M and so is platform independent -- there are no dll's or mex functions.
MATLAB release	MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a)
Other requirements	Tested on Windows XP and Mac OS X.

Tags for This File
Everyone's Tags	example, gui tools, uigetfile uigetfiles files directory
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Comments and Ratings (26)
17 May 2006	Scott Miller	Sweet. This saves me a lot of time; I was going to have to write one of these myself. I like that it is written completely in m script; there is really no point in writting such an interface as a dll if you don't have to, and this makes is easy to customize. It also doesn't seem to to have that "where's my dialog box?" effect of uigetfiles, (NOT uigetfile!), where occasionally, randomly, the dialog box will "open" with the window closed on startup. My only complaint as a windows user is uipickfiles has that funny UNIX smell to the UI (e.g., "..\" instead of an up arrow, files are sorted by case and then alphabetically instead of alphabetically), but hey, you can't have everything, and the script is right there if you want to change something.
15 Jun 2006	Laszlo Totthfalusi	Smashing, cool
10 Jul 2006	Lennaert Klerk	Great!! This saved me so much time and is going to be used a lot by me and my colleagues....
24 Jul 2006	Johann Boleininger	Very useful, many thanks.
17 Feb 2007	Oleksnadr Dzyubak	Just Great!!! I work on Linux where uigetfile is buggy. The "uipickfiles" is an excellent workarround. Many thanks!
16 Mar 2007	Chris K	The interface looks great, but I can't use it because of the following error and others. ??? Subscripted assignment between dissimilar structures. Error in ==> uipickfiles>add at 353 dir_picks(end + 1) = dir_pick; ??? Error using ==> waitfor Error while evaluating uicontrol Callback I am running: MATLAB Version 7.4.0.287 (R2007a) on Mac OS X
20 Mar 2007	Douglas Schwarz	TMW changed the struct returned by dir in R2007a. I have updated uipickfiles accordingly. (It will still work with older versions of MATLAB.) Thanks for the report.
21 Mar 2007	Chris K	Thank you for updating it! I am thrilled to be able use it!
10 Apr 2007	Patrick Naulleau	Any chance of getting a non-nested function version of this allowing it to work in earlier versions of Matlab?
11 Apr 2007	Douglas Schwarz	Patrick, yes it could be done. Email me and we'll discuss it. -- Doug
18 May 2007	Elakkat D	reallay useful tool
11 Jun 2007	Oleksandr (Alex) Dzyubak	I am working on image processing and for me that is usual practice to have more than 100 images in a set. The native MATLAB utility uigetfile does not support that at the moment. In fact, uipickfiles DOES. Which is more, it works in Linux and Windows and for R2006b and R2007a. Thanks Douglas!!! Nice product! Alex
06 Jul 2007	B. Andre Weisntock	I needed an intuitive way for a non-MatLab user to load multiple directories into a MatLab stand-alone application and this product was EXACTLY what was needed. Perfect. Many thanks Doug!
04 Feb 2008	Jeff Meganck	Incredibly useful, very well written program. I have incorporated this program into almost all of my own scripts. I just upgraded to R2007b(7.5.0) and started to get the following problem: ??? Subscripted assignment between dissimilar structures. Error in ==> uipickfiles>add at 353 dir_picks(end + 1) = dir_pick; ??? Error using ==> waitfor Error while evaluating uicontrol Callback The fix was easy. Add 'datenum',[] at the end of line 171 so that it reads: dir_picks = struct('name',{},'date','','bytes',[],'isdir',[],'datenum',[]);
28 Mar 2008	Joe Spernyak	Great for Queue'ing up lots of files/datasets for overnite processing.
19 Aug 2008	Thomas Ibbotson	This looks like just what I need. However I was getting an error when I first tried to use it. It appears that if you specify a filter which returns no files, there is an error: ??? Error using ==> vertcat CAT arguments are not consistent in structure field number. Error in ==> uipickfiles>filtered_dir at 762 d = [ddot1;ddot2;dfiles(index1);ddir(index2)]; Error in ==> uipickfiles at 164 fdir = filtered_dir(full_filter,re_filter); I fixed this by adding these lines: 762 if ~isempty(dfiles) 763 d = [ddot1;ddot2;dfiles(index1);ddir(index2)]; 764 else 765 d = [ddot1;ddot2;ddir(index2)]; 766 end It might not be the best way to do it, but it works for me.
20 Aug 2008	Ben Bratton	Excellent code. Very helpful for myself and colleagues. We work with image processing and this greatly simplifies our lives.
09 Oct 2008	Rene Michels	Great Job, THX for sharing! It really helps me out!! Greetings, Rene
23 Jan 2009	Skip	Very useful. Thank you! Is it possible to have files added to the list in Ctrl+click order? This would avoid the need to sort files after selecting.
24 Jan 2009	Douglas Schwarz	Skip, you can double-click on a file and it will be added to the list immediately. That may be sufficient for your purposes, but I will look into your suggestion.
24 Jun 2009	J W	Great File! One quick question though - how might I go about removing hidden files from file lists? I notice that when I have hidden files in the same directory as the images I am trying to retrieve, hidden file versions with prefix '._' appear first making file selection very non-intuitive. Any solutions?
25 Jun 2009	J W	Actually, I just found a workaround. At every designation of 'filenames' I follow it with a series of loops testing each filename to see if it is preceded by '._' My supplement to the code is working well if anyone needs to have hidden files removed from file lists.
25 Jun 2009	Douglas Schwarz	J W, what platform are you using and what kinds of files are those? Do the hidden files somehow pair up with non-hidden versions so you have both ._abc.txt and abc.txt? It would be easy to add a feature so that hidden files are not displayed in uipickfiles as long as we can identify them. Tell me more.
11 Sep 2009	Nathan Greco	Very useful, especially when loading in multiple files at one with a regexp filter. Thanks a lot!
14 Sep 2009	Bernd	This would have saved me a lot of programming, well it will even save some time in future....perfekt, classic 5 stars for SUPERUSEFUL
07 Nov 2009	Weimin

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Updates
20 Mar 2007	Updated to work with R2007a.

Tag Activity for this File
Tag	Applied By	Date/Time
gui tools	Douglas Schwarz	22 Oct 2008 08:23:18
example	Douglas Schwarz	22 Oct 2008 08:23:18
uigetfile uigetfiles files directory	Douglas Schwarz	22 Oct 2008 08:23:18

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