Best Free File / Disk Catalog Organizer

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Last Update: Tue, 09/22/2009 - 19:17 — omsairamana

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Introduction

A file or disk catalog organizer helps index files stored on hard disks, removable media such as CDs, DVDs, USB drives or network drives in a few seconds and create catalogs for searching files without having access to the original media.

Some useful organizers provide searching capabilities based on file name, date and size, filtering options, or searching duplicates or singles, etc. These organizers save your precious time and effort in finding the files you want instantly from a collection of even thousands of files on your storage media.

Discussion

Cathy is a tiny portable program that catalogs files on removable media, or on your hard drive. Once indexed, you can quickly search and locate a file by name, size, and date, with additional search fields for MP3 files. Multiple catalogs are supported and you can also search for duplicate files. There is also a handy directory listing feature that allows you to print the contents of any folder.

The real strength of this program is its speed; it can index hundreds of thousands of files without a problem. This makes it handy for sysadmins as well as users with large file collections. Cathy doesn't index the contents of files, just file names and other file properties. If you want to search contents use a desktop search program.

Gentibus - "for the people" - is a very good name and choice if you're looking for a tool to organize your CD/DVD collection. The scan on CDs, DVDs or hard disks can be categorized and searched. The advanced search function will also find "Harry Po" if you're looking for "Harry Potter". Gentibus will find duplicates, smartly discovers image, audio, video and program files as 'super-categories' on its own, which comes very handy when you're archiving a medium with mixed content. A very pleasing feature is that Gentibus will show you thumbnails of any pictures you might have archived on your CD/DVD so you will be able to search them somewhat as a virtual CD.

Visual CD scans all the usual suspects in an explorer-like approach. The 'catalogs' contain the data of one medium, can be password protected and joined by favorites and also display the contents of zipped files. The search is very refined as you would expect in a competent file manager, complete with an 'extra' menu with very welcome features (dublicates, file splitter, thumbnail-maker, etc.) and the option menu allowing you to adjust the software to your needs.

Disclib is a terrific utility. I archive all of my projects to CD/DVD and keep them in a fireproof box for storage. But there are over 30 full discs now (half are DVDs), and many of them have multiple versions of the same project. Disclib keeps an index of the file/directory structure of every disc, so I can search through them all without having to swap 30 discs in my drive! Invaluable!

Tags

file catalog, disk catalog, disc catalogue, file organizer, disk organizer, disc organiser, free software

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#1Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/07/2009 - 10:04.

Camel Disc Catalog is freeware, but only Russian version is available.

#2Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 01:22.

InsideCAT Lite Edition (9.1 MB, http://www.insidecat.biz). Alas, no more than 100 discs.

lloonn

#3Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 16:54.

Try this one:

www.se-soft.com/Explorer.aspx

SE Explorer

A two-pane file manager that looks to have some good features - a portable version, media player, image viewer, pdf viewer, file difference compare, etc.

#4Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 09/17/2009 - 14:59.

Seem to be good ill try thanks for sharing

#5Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 04/12/2009 - 16:05.

I like CDScan for it's speed and simplicity. If you have numerous CDs with a lot of backup files, you'll find it useful too. It lets you search for a file, and then lets you know which CD it is on. Visit :
http://www.geocities.com/mmonti_1/CDScan.htm

Brian

#6Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/02/2009 - 23:07.

Well I have a lot of Disks with compressed files, mostly rar and 7zip so I need a cataloging app that can scan inside archives, I also have quite a bit of CD's and DVD's with multimedia (music, movies and photos) and after trying a few I settled on DEP 3, it also has a TC plugin for searching catalogs with TC, an ability to export a Data Base with an external viewer so you can search a catalog on any PC.
Creates thumbnails from almost every kind of image and video, extracts tags and information (duration, bitrate) from almost every kind of audio file (mp3, ogg, wma, aac ...), supports tags and thumbs for all QuickTime files, it can create thumbnails for fonts(ttf, otf) simplefies finding the font you need from a large collection (I have over 500 different fonts collected over the years), one of the coolest thing is searching for files inside archives, it can even create thumbnails from archived files, it support regular expression, wiled card and searching with a substring. It has description support for Office 97-2003 files.
The only downside is it doesn't support Open Office odf files or MS Office 2007 OOXML files.

This application is free for Home use only, for usage in an organization a license is required.
Disk Explorer Professional 3
Besides English there are a few more languages supported like: French, Spanish, Russian, German and a few other European languages...

#7Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/29/2009 - 07:17.

For searching i recommend two freeware tools.

Everything
www.voidtools.com

IndexYourFiles
http://www.indexyourfiles.com/

Using Everything you may feel like searching in google suggest because results appear as you type. It takes a few seconds to build a very small data base file for you hard drive. Portable and free. Just a single exectuteabe.

Indexyourfile is not live search but it has many features, search inside files, preview of files inside indexyourfiles, thumbnails preview, you can make database of even network folders and has a many other customizations. again it is, Portable and free, Just a single exectuteabe.

#8Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 09/17/2009 - 14:55.

thanks interesting i'll try; thanks for sharing

#9Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/26/2009 - 17:14.

Spent years literally, searching for a decent cataloguer. Then saw the review here for Cathy. Asbolutely superb and portable too.

#10Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 02/16/2009 - 16:28.

DKFinder (http://www.dkellner.hu/freeware/finder/) is quite a cotender in this desktop search war. Check it out.

#11Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 14:08.

CD Archiver http://pmcchp.com/cdarchiver/index.html

#12Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 22:27.

I looked at a couple of these utils.
I need a cd cataloguing program that automatically catalogues any cd inserted without you having to click an icon to read the disk's contents. Any cd that was already in the database would be ignored..
Any suggestions?
cheers
trixys

#13Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 01/20/2009 - 00:55.

Site Advisor is warning against S1 cataloguer, Gentibus and WinCatalog

#14Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 03:00.

They are all fine, however Avast Antivirus gives a false positive on a system file installed by Gentibus, this has been verified as a mistake and will be corrected soon.

#15Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 11:28.

I have used CD Index for ages, it is Taiwanese but also has English language.

Lightening fast, allows you to play with structure, good search facilities.

homepage: http://home.pchome.com.tw/team/ie9486119/

download:
http://my.so-net[dot]net.tw/minghsiu/cdindex/cdindex2.1.16-Installer.exe

http://my.so-net[dot]net.tw/minghsiu/cdindex/cdindex2.1.16.exe

#16Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 01/17/2009 - 19:26.

Recently I've found SI Cataloguer 2.2
http://www.freewarefiles.com/SI-Cataloguer_program_35391.html

It's all I need.

#17Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 01/11/2009 - 13:26.

I prefer Disk Explorer Professional 3
the last version is freeware.

http://www.tjelinek.com/main.php?section=dd

it has a lot of features and it's written in c++ so it's faster then those Delphi apps (like whereisit).
http://www.tjelinek.com/img/dep/dep.png
It can scan inside most archives like zip, rar, 7-zip, ace ...
Has exif support for images, and imdb for movies and a holle lot of other features.
The only downside is that it hasn't been updated in some time.

#18Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 01/12/2009 - 12:15.

Thanks for this one. Busy playing with it and I am very impressed. I've been using DiscLib (which also has not been updated in quite some time). In a way they are similar, which is good since I liked DiscLib, but so far Disk Explorer Professional 3 surpasses it.

Note that it's not completely freeware, but free for non-commercial use only.

#19Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/06/2008 - 07:31.

A program that's not updated recently but just does the job is
DiskCat. I continue to use it as i have a large existing catalogue. This is more for data catalogues and archives. Visual CD was the better choice for music collections but I've tried the others here.

http://www.rob.cybercomm.nl/diskcat/index.html

It will index the contents of Zip files, supports other languages, etc.

The web site is funky but the program is fine. You can create sub-directories with other catalogue sets, like photos, archives, installers, reference, etc.

#20Submitted by vorce on Fri, 11/21/2008 - 14:56.

I stick with Cathy, whose (only) executable is a less-than-60KB file!!!

#21Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 11/08/2008 - 07:57.

I've tried many, but Gentibus is what I need.

#22Submitted by msorens on Mon, 10/20/2008 - 22:44.

I tried Visual CD and found it quite NON-intuitive with its unusual folder vs. favorites separation. Also, I asked it to show me thumbnails of a catalog with 1000 images. Besides the thumbnail view being verrry slow to appear, all it showed was an icon of the program, not the file! (Since these were all png files, they all had the same icon.)

I then tried Gentibus because of the Gizmo commentary stating that it "smartly discovers image-, audio-, video- and program files", and wow! This program is (a) fast to index, (b) intelligent with the image/audio/etc. categories, (c) fast to display thumbnails, (d) shows all CDs in a single folder tree, (e) has a nice, clean web site for support. The only thing lacking is a print capability.

#23Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 10/01/2008 - 16:33.

Visual CD 4.0 is released.

#24Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 20:51.

What do you think about MediaMan 2.2.1 (last freeware version)?

#25Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 20:51.

http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page18.html

#26Submitted by Geert on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 11:59.

I'm very satisfied with Cathy which I use to carry with me on USB-stick my lightening fast searchable MP3-catalog.

But recently I discovered Everything.

It indexes every NTFS volume (you can't specify what directories to catalog) very (and I really mean *VERY*) quickly and from then on monitors all changes.

You can start it up when you need it or let it run whenever Windows runs.

When searching (it supports regular expressions if you want it), it instantaneously shows the applying results while you type.

It is actively developed

I can even make the special Search button on my keyboard open a new Everything search window

I'm aware of Copernicus and other desktop searchers, but uninstalled them all because of their load on my system.

If you just need a tool to find a specific file that is somewhere on your hard drive, Everything is a must.
Oh, how I like those little gems, that just do what they are intended for with a minimal footprint.

#27Submitted by peter on Fri, 07/04/2008 - 07:58.

Summary:
After trying Cathy, Visual CD and several others I finally settled on CD Vista. Does a great job of cataloging all types of media.

Another option for this category is:
WinCatalog Light (http://www.wincatalog.com/light.html)

However, DiscLib is still my top choice, even though it hasn't been updated for quite some time now (it sometimes crashes so an update would be nice).

#28Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 09/25/2008 - 23:58.

What is CD Vista?
Where can you get it?

#29Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 19:52.

You can find CD Vista here [http://cdvista.com]

#30Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 02:51.

CD Vista has been renamed to Gentibus.

#31Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 02:54.

http://www.gentibus.com/

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Best Free File / Disk Catalog Organizer

Cathy

Gentibus

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