Why doesn't ENVI use the directories I specify under Preferences?

Sometimes ENVI users working in ENVI 5.0 or later versions notice that ENVI is not using the directories they specified under File > Preferences > Directories. This phenomenon is usually caused by the fact that over the past few years, ENVI has been rewritten to use a modern interface, yet some of the current ENVI functionality still runs the original ENVI code under the hood. The two versions of ENVI code (newer ENVI and ENVI Classic) use different preference systems. When you run one of the tools that uses ENVI Clasic code, it looks in the ENVI Classic preferences file for information about which directories to use. When using those tools, ENVI ignores the directory preferences that you may have set in the modern ENVI interface.

The work around for this problem is to start ENVI Classic for the version of ENVI you are using. ENVI Classic is installed along with the current ENVI application. You can start ENVI Classic on Windows by going to the Start menu and navigating to ENVI x.x > Tools, and then choosing any of the ENVI Classic options that you see there. Once ENVI Classic starts up, choose File > Preferences > Default Directories. There you can set the input Data, Output, and Temp directories for the tools that use the ENVI Classic code. Once you adjust those to match the directories that you've set in the main ENVI Preferences, then ENVI should look for and write files where you expect it to.

 

 

 

 

 

PS 3/3/2015; Review KK 3/2/15