I have a lot of music files, take a lot of digital pictures and save a lot of webpages locally on my computers and have had trouble looking for a right file or folder when hundreds or thousands of them are accumulated on the hard drive.
Apple iTunes has helped me a lot on music and PDF files and I have had less trouble looking for a right one when I need it. iTunes is now my favorite tools to manage my music library and the PDF-based research papers.
I don't prefer to use software like ACDSee, which I believe use the same principle as the "iTunes Music Library", to manage my picture library because it's not practical to store all pictures locally on a hard drive as I normally take pictures in RAW format, the size of which is typically 6 megabyte each. I need to archive them to DVD discs from time to time to free up the space of my hard drive, even though now it's 200GB in size.
What I usually do with my files or folders naming convention is that I try to put a lot of meaningful keywords in its name so that it could be easy to look for later on. When I need to archive the files on to a CD or DVD, I use a CD/DVD cataloging software to make a catalog of the files and folders on the CD or DVD and store it as a text file (which of couse could be XML-formatted file) on my hard drive for later searches.
Modern file-management utilities in Windows such as Total Commander (a software inspired by the famous Norton Commander back in the DOS days 10+ years ago) and PowerGREP provide a nice search feature that allows us to search for a file/folder name or for a text content inside a file by either using simple string-matching search or a more sophisticated and powerful regular-expression (RegEx) search. I have been getting very good search results with my file naming and cataloging practice and the regex seaches. It usually take me less than a few minutes to get a right file/folder from so many archive CDs and DVDs, and I get the right file/folder almost instantly if they are stored locally on the hard drive.
The current Microsoft Windows XP operating system doesn't have a powerful file metadata mangement system like Spotlight on Apple's Mac OS X Tiger and the long-anticipated metadata-rich WinFS from Microsoft hasn't yet arrived.
The practice that I've been using (and, as always, have been improving) might be useful for you. Please feel free to share with me your idea/technique if you like!
Resources on Regular Expressions:
Wikipedia: Introduction to Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions Reference - Basic Syntax
Keywords: windows, file-management, regex, regular-expressions, metadata
Apple iTunes has helped me a lot on music and PDF files and I have had less trouble looking for a right one when I need it. iTunes is now my favorite tools to manage my music library and the PDF-based research papers.
I don't prefer to use software like ACDSee, which I believe use the same principle as the "iTunes Music Library", to manage my picture library because it's not practical to store all pictures locally on a hard drive as I normally take pictures in RAW format, the size of which is typically 6 megabyte each. I need to archive them to DVD discs from time to time to free up the space of my hard drive, even though now it's 200GB in size.
What I usually do with my files or folders naming convention is that I try to put a lot of meaningful keywords in its name so that it could be easy to look for later on. When I need to archive the files on to a CD or DVD, I use a CD/DVD cataloging software to make a catalog of the files and folders on the CD or DVD and store it as a text file (which of couse could be XML-formatted file) on my hard drive for later searches.
Modern file-management utilities in Windows such as Total Commander (a software inspired by the famous Norton Commander back in the DOS days 10+ years ago) and PowerGREP provide a nice search feature that allows us to search for a file/folder name or for a text content inside a file by either using simple string-matching search or a more sophisticated and powerful regular-expression (RegEx) search. I have been getting very good search results with my file naming and cataloging practice and the regex seaches. It usually take me less than a few minutes to get a right file/folder from so many archive CDs and DVDs, and I get the right file/folder almost instantly if they are stored locally on the hard drive.
The current Microsoft Windows XP operating system doesn't have a powerful file metadata mangement system like Spotlight on Apple's Mac OS X Tiger and the long-anticipated metadata-rich WinFS from Microsoft hasn't yet arrived.
The practice that I've been using (and, as always, have been improving) might be useful for you. Please feel free to share with me your idea/technique if you like!
Resources on Regular Expressions:
Wikipedia: Introduction to Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions Reference - Basic Syntax
Keywords: windows, file-management, regex, regular-expressions, metadata
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