I am new to file management at this level of complexity. At this stage, two things are important to me.
A user friendly tagging system for all files (something like what MusicBee uses would be great)
A way to search by file content
I have been researching my needs for a couple of weeks and I am down to Directory Opus and one other product, and I have both installed on a trial basis.
I am running Windows 10 Home. I have installed Adobe PDF Ifilter 11 (64 bit) and Adobe PDG Ifilter 6.0 (32 bit?). I have set Indexing Option to “Index Properties and File Contents”. I have let the indexing process run its full course. I can search by file content on the native File Explorer, including PDF files and ODT (Libre Office) files.
I can use Directory Opus to search the content of text and ODT files, but I can’t make it search PDF files. There may issues with other files, I don’t know because at this point I stopped looking, because PDF is not exactly an obscure file type.
Just to be explicitly clear, the PDF file I am using for my search is text searchable both internally and by File Explorer.
I attach a screen capture, if this helps, together with a screen capture from a File Explorer search on the same content.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer as to what I am doing wrong,
What you're doing looks correct, at least from first glance. I am not sure why the PDF IFilter would not be working with Opus there.
One thing you can try is to type beatrix into the search field at the top-right of the Opus window. That will send the search query to Windows Search, rather than using Opus's internal Find Files functionality, but still shows the results in Opus in the same way. It should generally give you the same results as the search field in File Explorer.
If you do that, does it then match the PDF file as well as the other two?
Yes, using Quick Search on contents returns all of PDF, ODT and text.
Odd.
Not knowing the app very well, it is hard to see what functionality I would be missing by using Quick Search..maybe using search to refine an existing search, but using boolean operators would provide some kind of work around.
The difference is mainly in how the UI works (explicit fields for different operations in the Find Panel, vs keywords and arguments you have to remember how to use if you need them in the Search Field), and whether indexing is used (the Find Panel is not indexed; the Search Field will use the Windows Search index if applicable).
I am not a developer, but have enough basic understand to understand the sense of what is being said. If it is right, it is nothing short of protectionism, although I don't understand why Adobe would align with Microsoft. Or rather, I can think of possible reasons, but they would be pure speculation.
Also interesting thoughts on a development path, sidestepping Adobe altogether.
We might see if we can get it working (in Windows 7 or better at least) but honestly you may be better off trying another IFilter (e.g. PdfXchange) as Adobe are known for being idiots
Well, I am not a fan of Adobe, and to be honest, I am not much struck by PDF-Xchange either. I can't find an ifilter on their site, their app doesn't feel terribly user friendly (still not worked out how to select text :/), and their "smallest, fastest, most feature-rich FREE PDF editor/viewer available!" costs $43.50. Go figure.
I seem to have spent the last two days trying to make Directory Opus (or XYplorer) work the way I need it to, installing and uninstalling apps, testing different file types, looking on forums, rinse and repeat.
I expected a learning curve, but I had been hoping to get on with my own work, that of organising my documents into a usefully searchable hierarchical, tagged filing system. I think I need something that works reliably (I never had a high confidence factor in searches in DO or XYP). And unexpectedly that is turning out to MS's own File Explorer, despite not offering tags.
And I need it to work out of the box, especially if I am paying nearly ÂŁ30 for it. It has been a very frustrating couple of days, although I welcome all the contributions and efforts to help made, here in the forum. As people store more and more data in multiple formats on ever larger hard drives, I am sure that the demand for filing systems searchable by content and tagging is going to increase. At the moment, it seems to be built round work arounds/exploits/hacks..finding a file manager that offers tags, find the right ifilter, get round restrictiions on file path length.
DO is a step in the right direction in many respects, but for me at least, it isn't there yet.
Just to point out again that the search through Opus that does work (using the search field in the top-right corner) is exactly the same as the one Explorer will do - so if Explorer is working for you in that regard then Opus will too.
