SEARCHING YOUR COMPUTER
©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 Files Knowing Some Text In the File
- Searching for Names in Genealogy Databases on Your Computer
- Searching for Image Files
- Searching for Duplicate or Similar Files
- Conclusions
This page was last updated 2015-02-01
Return to the Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page
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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 Searching
Your Computer - 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, names in
genealogy databases, duplicate files, 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
- 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
- Duplicate or similar files to decide which to delete, text
files or image files
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
- If you use my system for naming files as on my
Searching
Your Computer - Supplementary Notes , EVERYTHING
will find the files and sort them into an interactive timeline for the
person.
- NEMO-DOCS -- http://www.nemo-docs.com/
-- free program, shows names of documents, images, etc., on a 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 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 FOR NAMES IN GENEALOGY DATABASES ON YOUR COMPUTER
- 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; doesn't work on
all types of databases yet; there is also a free FHC version and a CD
version you can put on a CD with a database
- Author (Luc Comeau) is working on new version now in beta;
can be downloaded for free to try out -- http://www.mudcreeksoftware.com/genviewer2Beta.htm
-- doesn't have all features in it yet
SEARCHING FOR IMAGE FILES
- If you use a naming system such as the one described in
the Searching
Your Computer - 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
SEARCHING FOR DUPLICATE OR SIMILAR FILES
- GLARY UTILITIES -- good free file maintenance program; has
good duplicate file finder -- http://www.glarysoft.com/
-- go to Advanced Tools > Clean Up &
Repair
- DUPLICATE CLEANER -- http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/home
-- easy to use; finds 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
- AWESOME DUPLICATE PHOTO FINDER -- http://www.duplicate-finder.com
-- freeware, very helpful to find similar and exact duplicate images;
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
- To find images on your computer similar to a particular one
use one of these programs and search through the folders containing it
and other images.
CONCLUSIONS
- The Searching
Your Computer - Supplementary Notes has additional
information and programs, including my naming system for files.
- Our computers get loaded with information and file
maintenance takes time, but is usually worth it; hopefully
this gives you some tools to help.
Return to the Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page
or Don's
Class Listings Page .