Using Organyze 2.1 to manage photos, music and movies

How Organyze 2.1 helps at work and at home

Great value in personal life

WHY IT IS USEFUL: We have begun to store more and more things in our computers – photographs, music, videos, e-bills, airline e-tickets, various scanned documents … That’s a good way of keeping the information instead of on sheets and slips of paper that go astray. The problem: as we store more stuff in the machine, we find it more difficult to find the things quickly.

Also, maybe we store stuff in a dumb way, and don’t really use the computer’s power to make the stored information more useful (like adding details of a song – singer, other musicians, instruments used, film, year of production, and so on, to a music file). The organizing and retrieval of image, video and audio files is usually more difficult than organizing document, spreadsheet or presentation files.

We store hundreds of photographs of people and places. The best we do is to use a phrase in the file name to identify the photo when we need to find it next. That’s clearly not enough. Spend just a couple of days in the Rocky Mountains or on the beaches in Goa, and be sure to come away with hundreds of photographs. Digital photography has made it so easy.

To find one among all of them, you have to open them one after another or search through thumbnails until you find what you want. And, when you do find it, you can’t identify some of the people in the photo, or the place where you snapped it – let alone an event like “Rita telling us about her book at the Sunrise Café”.

WHAT YOU CAN MANAGE: You can manage files of all formats. Organyze is very useful with Word, Excel, Power Point and PDF files, for example. And it is especially useful for labeling, commenting on and searching for image, video and audio. But you can also use it for formats like AutoCAD.

SOME EXAMPLES: With Organyze, you could use labels to identify places and comments to list people, places and events. You could use a ‘comment’ as a long caption, saying, “Rita telling us about her book at the Sunrise Café in Goa. Others in the photo (left to right): Kumar, John, Sheila and Sheila’s dog Bozo.”

You could attach a comment / caption to your old class photograph, or a picnic shot, listing every one sitting and standing, from left to right, and the occasion on which the photo was taken.

What’s more, you can find the photos without having to search through folders and sub-folders and through hundreds of thumbnails. Just use the appropriate keywords to search in comments, and, presto, you will get a short list of photos with those keywords. So, in the above case, you could use the keywords Sheila, Bozo and Sunrise Café (or Goa) to get a handful of photos from which it becomes very easy to find the one you want.

ADDING VALUE: There are many ways you can use Organyze to add value to your files. Here is one.

Attach labels like ‘Merryl Streep’, ‘Pierce Brosnan’ (or names of other actors, the director, Phyllida Lloyd, and others) to your Mamma Mia video file.

Then add a comment like this: “Mamma Mia! (promoted as Mamma Mia! The Movie) is a 2008 stage-to-film adaptation of the 1999 West End musical of the same name, based on the songs of successful pop group ABBA, with additional music composed by ABBA member Benny Andersson. Produced by Universal Pictures in partnership with Playtone and Littlestar, it became the highest-grossing film musical of all time. The title originates from ABBA's 1975 chart-topper "Mamma Mia". Merryl Streep heads the cast, playing the role of single mother Donna Sheridan. Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgard play the three possible fathers to Donna's daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried).” 

Next time you need to see movies in which Merryl Streep or Pierce Brosnan has acted, just double-click on these labels, and you can be sure Mamma Mia will be in the list you get instantly.

Similarly, if you have many movies of Ridley Scott in your machine, you can simply select the label Ridley Scott and find files for the films Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster, Body of Lies, and other films directed by Scott (if you have these files in your machine, and if you have attached the label ‘Ridley Scott’ to them.

SAVE TIME, ACHIEVE MORE: Just try it. It will take a few seconds instead of the many minutes you may otherwise take to find the files, especially if they were downloaded at different times and got stored in different folders. It doesn’t matter where you have saved them.

Add up all the minutes you save, and you would save hours every month, and days every year by using Organyze 2.1. What’s more, you will be able to do more with your files (as with giving synopses as comments to film files or captions as comments to photographs).

NOTES

1. You can attach labels and comments to files of any format. No restrictions whatsoever - .wav, .avi, .mpeg, .mpg, .wvw, .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .doc, .xls, .pps, .ppt, .pdf, .zip, .rar and any other file formats you happen to use.
2. Organyze 2.1 gives you the option to attach bookmarks, labels and comments to the image, video and audio files. You can attach multiple labels and detailed comments, which you can see when you take the cursor down a list of image files along with a preview of the files. So you can zero in on the file you want without bothering to open many of them to find the one you need. You can also preview images as you take the cursor from file to file down the list.
3. Organyze 2.1 also allows you to find the files you need by clicking on one or more labels, and to do a keyword search through the comments you have attached to the files. Or just click on the bookmarks button, and all book-marked files will instantly show in a list.

You may have some questions, for example:

How will I ever write all these synopses (like the one above, for Mamma Mia)?

It’s simple. Just go to Wikipedia, and download the intro from the article there (as has been done in the case of the Mamma Mia intro above). Or you may have a review from a newspaper of magazine to pick from.

But how can I attach labels and comments to all the stuff I have already got? It will take me months!

Well, it could. But whatever you do label and comment on will be easier to find and worth more to you. And there’s an easier way with Organyze 2.1. You can select many files (in the flat list you get from one or more folders from one or more drives) and attach a label or comment to all of them at the same time. You can also use an easy drag-and-drop method to attach labels to one or many files or folders. So you won’t really take so much time to attach labels and comments to your photographs, music and videos.

If you have more questions, just send us a mail here. We’ll be happy to try and answer them.

For more information, go to: http://www.organyze.com/

Search, advanced search

Organyze offers several methods to find the files or folders you need:
	Quick search by selecting multiple labels: The Quick search option is the one you see when you launch Organyze. Just enter the names of the labels you want (and Organyze will prompt you as soon as you begin writing), select the 'OR' or 'AND' option if you have selected multiple labels, and click on the Search button. The list of all the files with the selected labels attached to them will show instantly, regardless of where (folder, drive, disk) the files are saved.
	Very fast retrieval by single label: In the section 'Advanced search / manage' go to the panel on the left marked 'Labels', and double-click on a label. (To go to a label, just start typing the label you desire, and the cursor will quickly move to the desired area of the panel.) That's it. A list of all files with that label will appear almost instantly – irrespective of where (folder, drive, disk) the files are actually located. You can only do this one label at a time – but no other search can currently match the speed of this method. To go to a label, just start typing the label you desire, and the cursor will quickly move to the desired area of the panel.
	Very fast retrieval by multiple labels: Under the 'Search' bar you will see a link 'By label'. When you click this link, a list of labels with check-boxes will open up. Select the labels you want, and then click on the 'Get list' button below the label list. The list of all the files (or folders) with the selected labels attached to them will show instantly.
	Fast retrieval by multiple labels and filters: Select the labels you want by checking the check-boxes in the label list in the 'Search' pane (as in the previous method), make one or more of the other choices in this pane (including selecting one or more folder, entering a keyword to be found in a file title, content or an email, file size, date range) and then click on the 'Get list' button below the label list. The list of all the files (or folders) with the selected labels attached to them, which conform to the filters you have set, will show instantly. You can see all your labels in one place – so that you can double-click on any one to get all the files or folders with that label attached. You get the list instantly; it does not matter where the files or folders are located. These methods work only if you have attached labels to files, and seek a list of labeled files. (In the enterprise version, Organyze will fetch relevant files from all the machines to which your machine has access, provided these machines also have Organyze installed in them. Also, in the enterprise version, one person can do the labeling centrally, and everybody else can use the system, besides using their own personal labeling.)
	Keyword search: This works pretty much like the Windows keyword search, with the difference that you can select multiple folders and sub-folders in different folders and drives (and different machines, in the enterprise version), select the file formats you want, or get a list of folders only. You can also use multiple keywords with and / or options.
	Single flat list: This works pretty much like the Windows keyword search, with the difference that you can select multiple folders and sub-folders in different folders, drives, and you can select the file formats you want, or get a list of folders only. When you seek file lists, the default will fetch you all the files in the selected folders. To reduce the size of the list, you can use various parameters to narrow the search. These include:
		By file format, keywords (through one or more option of searching for keywords in the file name, in the file content, through comments attached to files, and through emails in MS Outlook)
		By file size (less than 100 KB, less than 1 MB, more than 1 MB, or a minimum size you can specify) by multiple labels