Adding your own options to the XP right click menu. ~ Ask The Admin

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Adding your own options to the XP right click menu.

As avid Windows users you have seen how applications add right click menu options. For instance Mcafee antiVirus adds a shortcut to Scan For Threats in the selected folder or Resco's options to encrypt or de-crypt a folder.


Now you want to add useful right click options for yourself and AtA is here to show you how!

It is actually pretty easy and involves NO registry editing like you might have expected. Simply open up my computer choose Folder Options and then File Types


And then click the advanced button and then the New button to associate an Action with this file type. For this example I am associating JPG files with editing in Adobe CS2. In the action line I type what I want to show up on the right click menu and the application used to perform action is the command line for the magic behind the shortcut.

I advise you to use the Browse button to browse on over to the EXE associated with the application you want to open. Here I browsed over to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe . It puts this in quotes leave them there and put a space after the last quote and add another quote followed by %L and another quote. This passes the selected file name to the application. Without this it will just open Photoshop and what good it that?

But after you are finished and click ok on all the open windows you can go check out your handy work by right clicking on a JPG...


And what do you know? It actually works! Ah what a great way to start the day shaving valuable seconds off of my work flow. It might give me an extra 15 minutes over the course of the day to play with FireNes!

_TheRightClickThisAdmiN_