SEARCHING YOUR
COMPUTER - SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
©2015 by Donald R. Snow
- Welcome and Introduction
- Types of Searches on Your Own Computer
- Naming Document Files So You
Can Find Them Later
- Naming Image Files So You Can Find Them Later
- 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
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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 notes are an expanded
version of the Desktop
Search Tools classroom notes, also on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
.
- Tips: (1)
Easy to put an icon on your
desktop for the URL for these notes; just drag the icon 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: 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
- 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
NAMING DOCUMENT FILES SO YOU
CAN
FIND THEM LATER
- Consistent naming takes time,
but makes finding files easier later to organize, copy, move, and
backup them up
- Freeware program EVERYTHING
(see below)
will create a timeline of the person's life is you use this naming
system
- My system for naming document scans
and screenshots for family history
- These naming methods make it
easy to
find files and documents; for example, to see all marriage records
relating to Snows use the freeware program EVERYTHING (see below) and
search for "snow marriage"; more details are in my Screen Capture notes
on my FH class notes webpage -- http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
NAMING IMAGE FILES SO YOU CAN
FIND THEM LATER
- My system for naming
photos of people. places, and events -- I use a different
naming system for camera photos than for documents.
- I use:
"YYYY-MM-DD-HHh-MMm-SSs-[DescriptiveWords]-[camera
name of photo].ext where the date and time in front are from the
metadata that the photo was taken
- Example:
"2004-01-20-10h23m16s-DianeManwaringSnow&DonaldRaySnowJrInBarbadosArchives--P1200004.jpg"
- Including date and
time in front makes photos alphabetize chronologically regardless of
the camera they came from, if
the date and time were set correctly on the cameras -- If
the image is from a scan of an old photo or slide, for example, you
will have to determine approximately when the photo was taken and
include that in front of the name
- I add descriptive
words after date and time and before the camera name of the
photo so it is searchable
- I leave the camera's
name for the photo in the title since I keep an unedited copy of all
photos in my Original Photos folders, so I can go back to the original,
if I ever need to
- Example:
"2004-01-20-10h23m16s-DianeManwaringSnow&DonaldRaySnowJrInBarbadosArchives-P1200004.jpg"
- Example:
"2007-06-12-05h20m24s-DonaldRaySnowAndDianeManwaringSnowInFrontOfLondonFlatOnDayTheyArrivedInEnglandLondonMission--IMG_0044.jpg"
- Example:
"2007-06-12-08h59m37s-PresClaytonFFoulgerAndDianeManwaringSnowAndDonaldRaySnowInFrontOfHydeParkChapel--IMG_0047.jpg"
- Freeware
program NAMEXIF -- http://www.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html
-- copies date and time of photo from metadata and puts it in front of
camera's name of photo
- EVERYTHING
makes searching easy for any image file with this naming system; can
search by event, person, location, date, jpg, etc
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
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
- SEARCH MY FILES -- http://funk.eu/smf/#Version_Archive_Anchor2
-- freeware with both portable and installed
versions; various searches available, but doesn't show text snippets
surrounding search results, just the info about the files they are in,
so it takes another step just to see the context and I don't use this
one very much; but does have a duplicates search and other criteria
- Searching pdf's for given text
- pdf's need the text
layer in addition to the
picture of the text page to be able to search them for words
- Text layer comes from OCR'ing
(Optical Character
Recognizing) the pdf
- pdf books downloaded from
FamilySearch have the text
layer with them; pdf books downloaded from Google do not have the text
layer and must be OCR'd to be searchable
- There are many commercial OCR
programs, e.g. http://finereader.abbyyonline.com
, and some good free ones
- Freeware PDF-XCHANGEVIEWER --
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
-- has a good OCR program built in
SEARCHING
FOR NAMES IN GENEALOGY DATABASES ON YOUR COMPUTER
- 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 above,
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
-- which is 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 notes are a shorter classroom
version of these notes.
- 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 .