admin wrote:binocular222 wrote:(3) Utilize a file manager to "browse by tag" instead of browse by folders
Man, this is on my table since long! It's part of my concept of "tag-based file management". A tree where the nodes are labels, or tags, or boolean combinations of tags. But I never got it 100% right in my head. I keep returning to it in my meditations. One day...
Well, that's the kind of navigation I wanted with this script...(while waiting for an integrated "tag-based file management"
).
Folders are a good storage component but they're useless (or even a nuisance) when it comes to managing Digital Assets. BTW, I definitely wanted to mention Lightroom, but
Filehero beat me to it!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ A few considerations about Digital Assets Management / XYplorer / Collection Manager
First, let's consider objectively that for dedicated work (images, music), nothing beats a dedicated soft. So here we're talking in a broader way — or when you want a quick and efficient access to your data without running those softs (which are usually quite slow to start-up).
Ideally, we'd like an easy way to find items based on what I'd called
filters: (user)rating, (user)labels, (user)tags, (user)classification, (file)metadata,... e.g.
- I want to find a comedy movie that I haven't seen (don't care on which drive it is)
- I want to find that good ebook about Design that I'd already started to read (don't remember where I put it).
BUT usually we'd like to refine the search —or at least identify differences between found items. It's in this results display that things get complicated...
- Among the comedies I now see, how do I know which one is a Family Comedy and not a Drama?
- What better way to identify this book among the other Design books than by its cover?
If Lightroom/Aperture/Picasa..., "work" so well, it's because we
see the results of our searches. And WindowsMediaCenter/iTunes/MediaMonkey... are great 1. because we're able to see the metadata (e.g. rating, year), and 2. especially when we also
see album covers.
So basically, my main approach was that
we must see what we're looking for! (though that shouldn't be an obligation —
see conclusion).
- See the items (through covers).
- See the "filters" (especially when covers aren't available).
Right now in XY, only filenames and labels are visible. There's no way to see tags written inside files, and for XY tags, you'd have to be in "Details" or "Details with (tiny) thumbnails".
For that reason, I chose to get the "genre" filters from filenames and not from tags (at least until "Large Tiles" becomes customizable
), the "status" (seeing/seen/priority/etc.) from labels, and with an exception for the ratings I reluctantly take from folders (IMHO, Ratings should be XYplorer's next best thing).
This allows you to effectively and efficiently perform
the previous searches in Collection Manager in less than 3 seconds!
To conclude for the moment:
Covers and filters are not mandatory. One can define a "Movies" or "Music" collection that just points to folders on different drives, with no covers and no tags, no renaming of filenames
(note that with covers, item filenames can be left as-is with only cover filenames named comprehensively). It would still provide a very fast way to search for a movie or music by name — much faster than starting a dedicated soft, or opening the several folders to perform several searches.
I tried to make Collection Manager "modular", that is, structured in different functions. e.g. For each collection, the indexed list of filters is built by a dedicated function which currently extracts most filters from filenames, but which can easily be changed to extract them from tags, metadata, (or even from inside a file), etc.
The search "algorithm" already uses a combination of different types of filters (from folder names for rating, from labels, and from filename filters), so it can easily be changed to match any new type of filters.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Geez, now I've talked too much again, and don't have time to post the script... Tomorrow then!
XYplorer Beta Club
, don't want to start a new thread to keep the flow of thought.
But for the former, I don't know a way of scripting that in XY, and for the latter, we'd have to click several time to view each submenu (we don't have the "dropdown" effect when pointing the mouse over scripted menu entries —yet 