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4. The Screen Setup of PhotoLine

## 4.23 Actions

It is possible to record the operations that you use on a picture. This way you can later use the same actions on another picture automatically. These recorded operations are called actions.

The dialog for managing actions shows at the top the already existing actions. You can edit them with the context menu. At the bottom right there are the Record, the Stop and the Play Button.

At the bottom left there are the New Action, the Button Mode and the Delete Action button. New Action and Delete Action speak for themselves. The button mode is a simplified mode of the action list. All actions are displayed as buttons and a single click on one of these buttons executes the corresponding action. You can only leave the button mode by using the context menu (see below).

Every action in the listing has a check mark at the left (or not). This check mark shows whether the action is enabled or not. This way you have the possibility to omit a working step when executing an action.

Beside the active check there is another field, which controls, whether the current working steps are executed with or without showing the corresponding dialog. If the dialog is not shown, the values will be used that were entered when recording the action.

You can edit this saved value by double clicking one of the steps. Leaving the following dialog with OK will store the new values. The step will not be executed.

A single working step can be moved with mouse to change the succession.

In order to record/create an action you have to proceed like this:

- Click the New Action button. Now you can name your action.
- Select the newly created action by clicking.
- Start recording by clicking on the Record button
- Now you can do your work. You should - wherever possible - use relative values in the dialogs, if you intend to use the action with different sized pictures.
- If you have completed your work, press the Stop button.
- You can add steps to an existing action by restarting recording. PhotoLine will add the new steps to the end of the active action. Afterwards they can be dragged to the correct position by using the mouse.

While recording an action pressing Insert Pause... inserts a pause. You can give the pause a name and a description. Furthermore PhotoLine is recording the active tool. When PhotoLine sees the pause on playing the action, the action is stopped and the name and the description are shown in the Actions dialog. A Cancel and a Continue button are displayed, too. Additionally the recorded tool is selected. Now the user can make any modification to the document, that is needed in order to finish the action in a reasonable way. Afterwards the action can be continued.

By doing a right-click (Windows) or Command+click (Mac OS) the context menu of the action dialog appears. Beside standard operations for creating, copying and deleting actions it offers functions to load, save and merge actions. Save active... only saves the currently selected action. Properties... allows to change the settings of the active action or action step. With Button Mode the button mode is entered or left again. Furthermore the context menu contains the command Action to Gallery which adds the active action to the Gallery (see chapter 4.22 and chapter 7.10.5).