importing pictures from kobo toolbox with stata

[Maria Mercado]

I am working in a study where the data collection is done by Kobo Toolbox and I am importing all the data from the different questionnaires into Stata to do the analysis. The questionnaires include pictures (jpg) taken by the kobo collect. I would like to know if possible to open the picture from stata, as stata makes the link between the study_id and the number of the picture; otherwise if I open the picture file outside stata I need to look manually to which study id corresponds.

Is it possible to open a picture from stata? Should I change the format of jpg in order to do that? As example I send when listing the variable of pics how it is shown in stata. Thanks Maria

[William Lisowski]

Stata does not seem to have any built-in viewer for pictures. With that said, it is possible to have Stata run an operating system command to open a picture in an external viewer. For example, in Stata on my Mac

shell open ~/Downloads/Tuscan-Landscape-900.jpg

launches Preview and opens the jpg in that application.

[Andrew Lover]

The -shellout- trick here might work?

https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...in-stata-graph

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

An alternative could be to use SMCL directives to launch the shell command with a clickable link. This performs the same -shell- execution command as described by William in #2, but adds the link.

di `"{stata !"/path/to/file.ext"}"'

Also, you could also use the SMCL browse directive to let your system decide how to open it (on Windows, this opens the file directly with it's associated viewer) but may also resort to a browser.

di `"{browse "/path/to/file.ext"}"'

These two methods have been discussed here and here.