DESKTOP SEARCH TOOLS
©2015 by Donald R. Snow
- Welcome and Introduction
- Types of Searches on Your Own Computer
- Searching for Files Knowing Something in the Name or Date
- Searching for Text Files Knowing Some Text In the File
- Searching for Image Files
- Conclusions
This page was last updated 2015-01-29
Return to the Utah Valley Technology
and Genealogy Group Home Page or Don's
Class Listings Page .
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
- Instructor is Donald R. Snow ( snowd@math.byu.edu
) of Provo and St. George, Utah.
- These note are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
along with the additional Desktop
Search Tools Supplementary notes.
- Tips: (1) Easy to put an icon on your desktop for the
URL for these notes or any URL; just drag the icon from in front of
the address in your browser to your desktop. (2) To open a
link from here in another tab, but keep your place in these notes,
hold down the Control key while clicking the link.
- The problem for today: How to find things on your own
computer: documents, scans, photos, information in genealogy
databases, etc.
TYPES OF SEARCHES ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER
- Computers have hundreds of thousands of files and folders on them --
the way to search depends on the kind and purpose of your search
- Text files have extensions like txt, rtf, doc, docx, pdf, odt,
xls, ods, ppt, etc. -- types of searches
- Files - knowing something in the title or date
- Files - knowing some text in the file
- In a known file - for text you know is there
- Genealogy databases - to find the one containing certain
genealogy
- To find duplicate files to decide which to delete
- Image files have extensions like jpg, tif, png, bmp, etc. --
types of searches
- Image files - knowing something in the name, date, or metadata of
the file
- Image files - containing pictures of certain people
- To find duplicate image files to decide which to delete
SEARCHING FOR FILES KNOWING SOMETHING IN THE NAME OR DATE
- EVERYTHING -- http://www.voidtools.com/
-- free program with installed and portable versions, extremely fast
-- you enter any character of the file title or date and see a list of
all such files, regardless of where they are on your computer; can use
it to find files, launch, rename, or delete files; can use it in
tandem with Windows Explorer to move and organize files; extremely
useful
- NEMO-DOCS -- http://www.nemo-docs.com/
-- free program, shows names of documents, images, etc., on calendar
by the date they were produced or modified so you can find it by
context, if you know about when you worked on it
- WIN7 SEARCH -- built into Windows 7; click on the Start/Stop button
(lower left corner) and type search terms in the box -- finds files by
name and by content and sorts them into type, e.g. documents,
programs, music, etc.; searches inside text files, including emails,
but is very slow and searches entire computer and you can't limit it
to just certain folders; shows them in Windows Explorer so you can
open the View Panel on the right to see what's in the file without
opening it in a program
SEARCHING FOR TEXT FILES KNOWING SOME TEXT IN THE FILE
- TEXT CRAWLER -- http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/textcrawler
-- freeware, but be careful on the download and installation or you
get extraneous stuff; find and replace across multiple files; you set
the folder and/or subfolders and tell it what kind of files to
examine, e.g. *.doc, or *.txt, or *.html, or set it as *.* to search
through all file types in those folders; set the search terms and
click Start; it first builds a list of all such files and then
searches for the terms in those; scroll bar across the middle of the
screen shows progress; when finished you see the file names in the top
panel and by highlighting any file there, you see the lines with the
search terms with a few words on each side in the bottom panel;
replace feature has several options on the pick list (small downward
pointing arrow at end of Replace box), items such as "Standard
Replace", "Insert Before", "Insert After", and "Delete". On the
Settings Menu (the gear-like icon) there are several options such as
"Prompt For Confirmation of Replace" since you may only want to
replace some occurrences of the search terms; can reset the numbers of
words to show around the search terms
- INFORAPID SEARCH AND REPLACE --
http://www.inforapid.de/html/searchreplace.htm -- free for
private use, find and replace text across multiple files, easy to use,
select folders and type of files to search; results show file names in
blue with search terms in red in the line where they occur, allows
Boolean searches with & (AND), | (OR), ! (NOT); clicking on
the highlighted search term takes you to the document where you can
edit it; right clicking takes you back to the results screen or to
start another search; Can also start a new search by clicking on the
Show Search Dialog bar at bottom; clicking on any other word in a line
starts a search for that word in all the files; past searches are
saved and shown in tabs at top so you can go back to any one; also has
a replace function; website only mentions that it works on versions of
Windows up through XP, but it seems to work fine on Windows 7;
download page mentions that to search pdf's you need to install
another free program first
- FILELOCATOR LITE 2014 (same program as old AGENT RANSACK) -- http://mythicsoft.com/page.aspx?type=filelocatorlite&page=home
-- freeware; after installing and restarting your computer it adds the
option in your right click menu so right clicking on a file or folder
gives option to search for words or phrases in it; allows Boolean
searches using AND, OR, NOT; shows search results with files in one
panel and search terms highlighted for that file in another panel; can
go through the files in the left panel by using the up and down arrow
keys and see the results in the right panel one file at a time; no
replace nor editing feature
- pdf's need the text layer to be searchable -- freeware program
PDF-XCHANGE VIEWER LITE now has built in OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) to form text layer on pdf's -- http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
-- can also use free version of EVERNOTE to search pdf's since pdf's
in notes in EVERNOTE are indexed overnight in free version and
immediately in commercial version
- Searching your genealogy databases for names -- GENVIEWER -- http://www.mudcreeksoftware.com
-- freeware version will only search in one file; commercial version
($20) will search within all genealogy files in a folder for
conditions you specify, e.g. "Given Name Contains John" and "Spouse
Name Contains Margaret"; commercial version has a free 15 day trial;
author (Luc Comeau) is working on new version which is in beta and can
be downloaded for free to try out -- http://www.mudcreeksoftware.com/genviewer2Beta.htm
-- doesn't have all features in it yet and only considers a few kinds
of files at present
- Searching for duplicate files
- GLARY UTILITIES -- freeware with a good duplicate file cleaner
-- http://www.glarysoft.com/
-- go to Advanced Tools > Clean Up & Repair
- DUPLICATE CLEANER -- http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/home
-- easy to use to find groups of duplicates; has selection criteria
to decide which dup to delete; has a button to make sure you don't
inadvertently mark to delete all files in a group of duplicates
SEARCHING FOR IMAGE FILES
- If you use a naming system such as the one described in the Desktop
Search Tools Supplementary Notes , you can find easily all
images of a person, location, event, type of event, date, year, etc.
by using EVERYTHING -- http://www.voidtools.com/
- To find pictures of a person -- PICASA -- http://picasa.google.com
-- free from Google; has facial recognition that puts thumbnails
around all faces in your pictures and organizes them in groups it
thinks are the same person -- see details in my PHOTOS AND PICASA
notes at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
; before running PICASA, be sure to set which folders you want it to
work on or it defaults to work on your entire hard drive and as it
adds thumbnails, it thinks these are new images, and does these again,
etc., so the results grow exponentially
- To find similar or duplicate images on your computer
- AWESOME DUPLICATE PHOTO FINDER -- http://www.duplicate-finder.com
-- freeware, very helpful to find similar and exact duplicate iamges;
shows the percentage it thinks the pictures are similar (100% for
exactly the same and down to 1% for not very similar); shows images
side-by-side to compare and you can save both or delete one
- SIMILAR IMAGES -- https://tn123.org/simimages/
-- freeware to search in folders you specify to find exact or
similar images, shows them side-by-side and indicates whether
identical or how close to identical so you can decide whether to
keep both or delete one
- If you have an image and want to find all similar ones on your
computer, use one of these programs to search through the folder it
is in and the other image folders.
CONCLUSIONS
- The Desktop
Search Tools Supplementary notes has additional
information and programs.
- Our computers get loaded with information that we forget, so
hopefully this gives you some tools to help find it.
- File maintenance on your computer takes time, but is usually worth
it.
Return to the Utah Valley
Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page or Don's
Class Listings Page .