iTunes for documents
March 6, 2021 11:30 AM Subscribe
You know how you can point iTunes at your music folder and it will sort through the whole mess and put it into some kind of order for you? I need that, but for documents. Does that exist?
Over the course of some 30 years using personal computers and the internet, I have accumulated several thousand documents, word, text, pdf, &c., which are stashed in my documents folder and various subfolders that represent my attempts, in the past, to organize the documents. My documents folder, I don't mind telling you, is a mess.
Is there any sort of ... document manager(?) that I could sic on my documents folder? Ideally it would analyze them based on contents and metadata in a way that allowed me to group them by, e.g., date created or similarity of content (there are a lot of documents that are, like, "February Report Final Version (AA Edits) (DD Edits) LAST VERSION I PROMISE (JJ Edits) submitted.doc" as well as all of the earlier versions that this naming convention implies.)
Going through them individually is a painstaking, low-value process which is why I haven't gotten a handle on this before, but it strikes me that we have computers specifically to do painstaking, low-value work of this sort.
My searches to this point have mostly pointed me at applications that seem oriented to taking notes and organizing them rather than grabbing up a bunch of existing documents and putting them into some kind of order.
Even if it only did word docs or rtf documents that would be a huge help. I'm using a MacBook Air M1. Thank you!
Over the course of some 30 years using personal computers and the internet, I have accumulated several thousand documents, word, text, pdf, &c., which are stashed in my documents folder and various subfolders that represent my attempts, in the past, to organize the documents. My documents folder, I don't mind telling you, is a mess.
Is there any sort of ... document manager(?) that I could sic on my documents folder? Ideally it would analyze them based on contents and metadata in a way that allowed me to group them by, e.g., date created or similarity of content (there are a lot of documents that are, like, "February Report Final Version (AA Edits) (DD Edits) LAST VERSION I PROMISE (JJ Edits) submitted.doc" as well as all of the earlier versions that this naming convention implies.)
Going through them individually is a painstaking, low-value process which is why I haven't gotten a handle on this before, but it strikes me that we have computers specifically to do painstaking, low-value work of this sort.
My searches to this point have mostly pointed me at applications that seem oriented to taking notes and organizing them rather than grabbing up a bunch of existing documents and putting them into some kind of order.
Even if it only did word docs or rtf documents that would be a huge help. I'm using a MacBook Air M1. Thank you!
If you’re on a Mac, you want DevonThink. It will group documents based on similarity of content, metadata, etc. I use it for filing scanned bills and it gets it right pretty consistently.
posted by neilbert at 12:42 PM on March 6, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by neilbert at 12:42 PM on March 6, 2021 [4 favorites]
Yep's sister app is Leap, which is what I have used.
No program will do it all for you automatically. You need to use these tools to gain control over your files. DevonThink will do it by organizing your documents in folders within its environment, and has a pretty powerful AI function (See Also and Classify) that will give you a boost. But it requires that you remain within its environment to keep the classifications in view.
Leap (and Yep, I assume) uses tags as the primary organizing tool, and this is very powerful since one document, wherever located, can carry any number of tags.
Both allow you to add comments to a file.
Either way, you have to do some work and think about your organizing structure.
posted by yclipse at 3:38 PM on March 6, 2021
No program will do it all for you automatically. You need to use these tools to gain control over your files. DevonThink will do it by organizing your documents in folders within its environment, and has a pretty powerful AI function (See Also and Classify) that will give you a boost. But it requires that you remain within its environment to keep the classifications in view.
Leap (and Yep, I assume) uses tags as the primary organizing tool, and this is very powerful since one document, wherever located, can carry any number of tags.
Both allow you to add comments to a file.
Either way, you have to do some work and think about your organizing structure.
posted by yclipse at 3:38 PM on March 6, 2021
I have not used it yet, but Hazel has come up in some similar discussions and might be helpful for you. Here is a description of the kinds of rules it can apply.
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 5:26 PM on March 6, 2021
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 5:26 PM on March 6, 2021
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Some things, though, like last-modified and created date, are accessible through column sorting in Finder. Full-text search is pretty good at this point - I'd try to think of some key words and build searches based off that, and use those to move the files into some broad-category based folders.
For things like PDFs, I'm using Calibre on Windows. It's an ebook manager, and has its own folder structure that it enforces, but that also lets you associate a lot of additional metadata with the PDF.
posted by sagc at 12:29 PM on March 6, 2021