Having Two Versions Of Elements in "Open With" Context Menu

[Chris Nicola]

I have Photoshop Elements 9 and Photoshop Elements 10 installed but it seems that I can only ever get one version of PSE visible in the right click/open with context menu. After installing PSE 10 the "open with" menu was stuck to open with PSE9 even though I manually browsed to the PSE 10 editor in the "open with" menu. Then I used the "OpenWithAdd" utility to get PSE10 in the context menu. It succeeded but now PSE9 has disappeared.

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/openwithadd.htm

I suppose I could use the "OpenWithAdd" utility to get back to PSE9. I would really like to have the option of having the choice to open with PSE9 or 10 in the "open with" context menu. Is this possible? Since these are two separate programs and can each be launched independently (although they will not both open at the same time) there should be a way to have both appear in the right click/open with context menu. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Kind Regards
Chris

 

[Ztruker]

ContextEdit should allow you to have a right click (Context) menu entry for PE9 and PE10.

Lets you control which items appear on your context menu

Use Edit to look at an existing one then add a new one for the other version.

OpenWith is a bit different so give this a try.

 

[Chris Nicola]

Thank you for this suggestion, I will look into it. However I do not need to just launch PSE from the context menu. I really wish to click on an image and use the "open with" command and choose either PSE9 or PSE10.

Kind Regards
Chris

 

[Ztruker]

Can't you chose Other then navigate to the two versions? Normally that adds the selected ones to the Open with list.

 

[Chris Nicola]

Thanks, I tried using the "open with" dialogue and browse choose the other version of PS Elements exe file but that doesn't work. The file still opens with the default version of PSE and the default "open with" context menu does not change. The "OpenWithAdd" utility is user friendly can be used to change the default but it seems I can only ever have one default version in the open with context menu. I installed ContextEdit but I have no idea how to use it. It seems because both versions of PSE use common files, Windows does not allow both to appear in the open with context menu. I am convinced it should be theoretically possible for both to appear in the open with context menu because each program can still open on its own and manually import files.

Kind Regards
Chris

 

[Ztruker]

With ContextEdit you key off of the file extension. So for pictures, you would look at/modify

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\

.jpg
.bmp
.gif
.png

You could do this directly in the registry but ContextEdit is a much easier interface to use.