XYplorer Beta Club

Hello everyone,

I would like to adapt XYplorer to catalog all of my electronic files AND my hard copy materials such as books, CDs, DVDs, family photographs, etc. The question becomes how to make the program function that way. The best solution might be to photograph each item, throw each photo into a folder such as "Books," "CDs," etc., and then categorize them appropriately. Is it possible to add custom columns to XYplorer such as "Author," "Title," "Call Number," etc., and then to search for files by the values in those custom columns? The program is more than capable of doing this, but it might be a matter of asking Don to do some additional tweaks. He is very gracious and I would like to twist his arm a bit to make this happen.

Thanks for any help or suggestions! I love XYplorer and I would truly love to make it THE program for anyone else who wants to power-use it this way.

The only limitation I see is the restricted number of retrieve-able custom columns info via scripting. You may also miss tabbing thru columns using... tab. Otherwise, sounds good.

Hi Skyfrontier,

I am new to XYplorer, so could you elaborate please? I would appreciate your thoughts.

Hello, Ryan!

I can vaguely recall someone else trying to develop a similar thing, "personal knowledge base" afaicr. Didn't followed the discussions so can't say it's the path for what you want.

Any way, what you described is perfectly doable - limitations considered. I can even foresee a flexible backup feature for it. And/or external (to usual .dats) support. PaperFolder based, perhaps...? Yes, let's discuss the way you proposed.

I'm a staunch dreamer of XYplorer as a cataloger, but until we succeed in hacking Don's TODO list, (I'd rather not twist his typing arm) here's a relevant script: Collection Manager (ed. it's not a calatoger per se, but rather a way to collect existing files)

I actually sense two great ideas here :
1) a cataloging system, and
2) a extension of Custom Columns: location based CCs, where a column definition changes based on the location. So the same column can show "Author" in the books collection and "Director" in the movies collection.
Sure this can be done thru some scripting or FVS with columnlayout, but a native switching solution will definitely be much faster and more make-sense-of-able.

The best solution might be to photograph each item, throw each photo into a folder such as "Books," "CDs," etc., and then categorize them appropriately.

Hmm, the new savethumbs SC could help here if it had the ability to extract thumbnails from a wider array of filetypes. (In my experience, it just seems to work with some common photo, video and pdf without any external shellexts)
Another method can be to [mis-]use Custom file icons and portable file associations. But I have no idea about the performance hit of registering potentially hundreds of those.

I'd just go and tag the stuff:
http://www.xyplorer.com/release_14.40.php#CAT

Then search by tags.

eh, how do you find a item that doesn't exist at searchtime? That's a main point of cataloging, like my shadowcats script.

btw, welcome back!

SammaySarkar wrote:eh, how do you find a item that doesn't exist at searchtime? That's a main point of cataloging, like my shadowcats script.

btw, welcome back!

1) ah, sure.
2) thanks! and thanks everybody for keeping the house alive!

SammaySarkar wrote:eh, how do you find a item that doesn't exist at searchtime? That's a main point of cataloging, like my shadowcats script.

btw, welcome back!

As I mentioned, there would need to be a file of some sort to use as a placeholder for each item in order for XY to recognize it for cataloging. Ebook cataloging software such as Calibre uses cover photos, so that would seem the obvious choice. The cover photos would be kept in specific subfolders within a main folder called My Physical Library or something like that.

Thus far, the only programs that perform on this level in the commercial library cataloging category, all of which are as quirky as they are expensive. Donald is obviously an extremely competent programmer, so he could adapt XY fairly easily to measure up to this, and it would render the software even more marketable because it would be entirely unique on the market. I think we should all encourage him to do so.

Ryan wrote:As I mentioned, there would need to be a file of some sort to use as a placeholder for each item in order for XY to recognize it for cataloging. Ebook cataloging software such as Calibre uses cover photos, so that would seem the obvious choice. The cover photos would be kept in specific subfolders within a main folder called My Physical Library or something like that.

In that case XY has everything you need. Just tag your placeholders...

Ryan wrote:Donald is obviously an extremely competent programmer, so he could adapt XY fairly easily to measure up to this, and it would render the software even more marketable because it would be entirely unique on the market. I think we should all encourage him to do so.

I am here for the encouragement. Don't know about the marketable advantage, I wouldn't expect XY to turn relational database, but I definitely vote for cataloguing features.

When savethumb() came out, I was hoping for a scripting solution. Sammmay's ShadowCats seems to be almost there. It's browsable, but it does not store thumbs. I especially depend on my folder.jpg thumbs for meaningful information. That's where Folders_with_Thumbs.xys comes into the game - most likely also by Sammay. I use it quite often, but always have to complement it with 3rd party tools.

We also had a discussion about "snapshots", formatted as a sort of html or something like that, to capture complete, scrollable list views including thumbnails (!) if appplicable. If I remember correctly this is still dangling in the air.

Ultimately, it were nice to roll all of those approaches into one mega-feature, browsable structure + column info + thumbnails.

admin wrote:

Ryan wrote:As I mentioned, there would need to be a file of some sort to use as a placeholder for each item in order for XY to recognize it for cataloging. Ebook cataloging software such as Calibre uses cover photos, so that would seem the obvious choice. The cover photos would be kept in specific subfolders within a main folder called My Physical Library or something like that.

In that case XY has everything you need. Just tag your placeholders...

True, but I would like to add custom columns for fields such as Author, Call Number, Series, etc. There is an option to "Add Column," but it doesn't allow me to add values to the new columns other than the "extra" columns, which are limited to 5 columns. There must be a step I am missing there.

Ryan wrote:There is an option to "Add Column," but it doesn't allow me to add values to the new columns other than the "extra" columns, which are limited to 5 columns. There must be a step I am missing there.

Read the help file - very thoroughly. It may not be obvious at first, but you can add 32 custom columns of the "hardwired" kind, and an unlimited number of so-called "soft columns" which are stored with the tab itself and can be instantly updated without reloading the whole list.

Don't confuse terms: The number 5 you mention refers to 5 "global hardwired columns", and also to 5 "extra tags" which allow checkboxes or popup pickers.

Before you embark on large scale projects, be warned that your browsing speed will slow down with an increasing number of custom columns. Don't know if this has to do with multi-thread processing (or rather the lack of it) - you won't be able to do keep working in the same XYplorer instance while columns are loading. Consider working with multiple XY instances. Press Escape to skip processing it the list takes too long to load.

Stef123 wrote:

Ryan wrote:There is an option to "Add Column," but it doesn't allow me to add values to the new columns other than the "extra" columns, which are limited to 5 columns. There must be a step I am missing there.

Read the help file - very thoroughly. It may not be obvious at first, but you can add 32 custom columns of the "hardwired" kind, and an unlimited number of so-called "soft columns" which are stored with the tab itself and can be instantly updated without reloading the whole list.

How do I add text to the soft and hard columns?

By adding a column, right clicking it and select from the context menu?