Is there a better way to organize my downloads?

Question

I'm a download pack-rat and have a large collection of downloaded files including software, music, videos, books, magazines and research papers. I'm looking for a better way to manage all of it. Dividing everything into folders gets to be a bit cumbersome.

What I'd really like is a file database that works kind of like some of the photo or music organizers available. Something that will let me assign multiple tags to files and is searchable.

Anyone know of something that would fit?

Update

Marking this as community wiki

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 31 '11 at 06:13

You can use JeniuS to easily organize all kinds of files, and add various information about them

JeniuS is an universal file organizer and is the main element in the JeniuS programs suite. It lets you organize your files and find them immediately when you need them. Files can be inserted into user-defined albums (i.e.: a music files collection) or into automatically generated ones. For every album you can specify the artist's name, a short description, an image (i.e.: the CD cover or the movie poster), the year and the gender. Every file inserted in JeniuS will be deeply analyzed and the most important information will be extracted: if it is a mp3 JeniuS will read id3 tags and will detect the bitrate, frequency, length..., if it is a video JeniuS will detect the codec, dimensions, number of frames per second... These information are stored in JeniuS' library and are used to catalog the file in the categories it fits best and to be able to find it easily in a second time.

There are several ways to find again a file stored in the library: for example, considering an audio file, you can select an album, the artist or the genre; show all audio files and then filter results; perform a basic or advanced search combining more search parameters; open the folder where the file is physically stored in.

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Does that use some sort of human readable format to store the metadata, or is it proprietary? I'd hate to be locked into one company's solution like that. — ceejayoz, Feb 08 '10 at 17:38

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 31 '11 at 06:13

1

Belvedere

Keep your desktop or any other folder on your hard drive organized and under control with Belvedere, an automated Windows file management tool. Use Belvedere's friendly interface to create advanced rules to move, copy, delete, rename, or open files based on their name, extension, size, creation date, and more.

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edited Aug 31 '11 at 06:13

Gareth

18,809

answered Feb 09 '10 at 03:39

fluxtendu

7,169

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 08 '10 at 16:23

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I just use Windows Search to index my hard drive. I don't organise anything in folders. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to tag files.

answered Feb 08 '10 at 16:23

Iain

4,748

You can't bulk-tag, but Vista/Win7 have the ability to add tags to some types of files. Not perfect, but not bad either. – Keithius Feb 08 '10 at 16:52
Unfortunately I don't think Windows Search indexes the tags. – Iain Feb 08 '10 at 17:17

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 08 '10 at 17:32

0

I just saw a review of Data Crow over at Lifehacker. It looks like a good option for doing exactly what you want.

Data Crow: http://www.datacrow.net/

answered Feb 08 '10 at 17:32

Insomnic

766

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 08 '10 at 18:39

TaggedFrog is a free program that can tag arbitrary files. It stores tags in a database and includes support for harvesting tags from filenames and windows metadata (i.e. the keywords field on File>Properties>Summary tab).

It includes a tag search as well as a tag cloud hierarchy for navigating your files.

Is there a better way to organize my downloads?

5 Answers5