15-Minute Reviews :: Advanced File Organizer v3.0

Hello everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Advanced File Organizer version 3.0 by SoftPrime Development – An application to aid you with cataloging your media.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states: (Portion)

“Advanced File Organizer is a cataloguer for your digital data collection.

It supports all kinds of media recognized by Windows as drives: CDs, DVDs, Memory Stick cards, ZIP disks, floppies, hard drives, network drives and folders. The key point is an ability to organize the information for most effective using it later, including convenient navigation, quick and powerful search, making reports and export to other formats.”

Quick Pros

• Quick at adding media to the application
• Ability to describe, change media name, and categories to help with organizing, sorting and filtering
• Spiders into ZIP and RAR files as well
• Ability to update a disc handy for removable (USB or -RW) media as well as indexing a storage drive
• Many different ways to print the data gathered
• Export functionality handy

Quick Cons

• Have to use the Assistant to categorize; Can’t do it in the main window (Could be a Pro however)
• Assistant would have done better if as you added files and folders to categories, it removed from right list
• Would have been nice to have ‘business class’ network support

Expansion

As a graphic design artist by day, we tend to go through a sizable number of DVDs for secondary backup method; While I do use a indexing application right now to make sure we keep track of older materials that have been ported off of our network for storage purposes, most of the applications on the market aren’t the greatest for search or other advanced features.

This application is quick at loading all the information from media to the application, considering the sheer amount of information offloaded from the media to the catalog. This helps a lot for those who are willing to take the leap from another application into this one, and has hundreds (Thousands?) of CDs and DVDs and doesn’t want to spend a month re-indexing their collection. There is a lot of features to help you with your organizing as well. You can change the name of the media (As well as folders and sub-folders) to reflect what may be labeled directly on the media as opposed to the volume label (Which may be a less-than-helpful date code or similar.) You can also add a description to each media unit, as well as folders and files. The same goes for categorizing; You can organize your entire collection by category as well to aid you further in searching later.

Something I haven’t seen often in my previous searches for similar application is the ability for the application to crawl through ZIP and RAR files as if they were just another folder; Very handy indeed. This means that you don’t have to worry about ZIPping up previous versions of a project and the files not being indexed as well.

The author has included a feature to make indexing media other than CDs and DVDs useful. Rather than removing and adding an entire drive (USB, hard drive, network attached storage, rewritable CDs & DVDs, etc.) to have it re-indexed, you simply select the drive under ‘My Catalog’ and click ‘Update Disk’ button. It retains your descriptions and categories for all folders and files when you use ‘Update Disk’, which is definitely nice.

The print options are stellar as well. The number of options are pretty impressive; From full catalog printouts, to simple disc listing, and a lot in-between. This is nice to have because it is not always an option to be able to sit on the computer to go through your disc index, or you have a rough idea already what you are looking for and you just need a quick lookup.

One aspect I did find nice is the ‘Export’ functionality. You can export to HTML, Excel, XML or CSV. I’d likely use HTML and place it up on our Intranet just so others can thumb through the index as well without having to come and antagonize me to find an old file they are looking for.

While I did categorize the required usage of the ‘Assistant’ under con, it could be partially a pro as well, depending on point of view. Reason it ended up in the con for me, is that you can not categorize right directly in the main window; You have to resort to another window to do so. This could be good however, especially with the Assistant’s minimal interface to avoid distractions while categorizing your entire collection. I’d likely prefer to do this right in the main window myself, but alas is not available. As well, I know that the application supports multiple categories, but when I’m rattling through a collection, it would be nice to have an option so that files you’ve already sorted into a category ‘disappear from the right-hand list; If you place an entire folder into a directory, it and its children would disappear too.

One last note; I do like this application a lot, and this is more a feature request for a professional (or enterprise) version of the application. Some form of network support for the application would be nice; What could be done is a ‘lite’ viewer only client which can open the database file and read the catalog, and then this client which can alter the file, even while being read by others. I know that the author has chosen to use a proprietary database format for speed, size, and the fact that you don’t have some extra database engine always running in the background; I still would think it’d be possible, and be a good way to bring in a little more licensing income.

Final Verdict

I am impressed with this application. The office I work with will be buying a licence to this application. It is easy to use, easy to find stuff in the application, and a lot of extra features I will use myself to aid in my day-to-day job. For free, if you have audio CD collection, or a lot of data on various medias and want a little more control over them, grab it while it is free. For $29.95, it is a perfect price-point for a great program; Definitely worth the price to those who would use it.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, May 15, 2007