Most of us use laptops or PCs for work or personal use. We download photos, documents, movies and music. Most of it ends up on the desktop. The Downloads folder has heaps of software installers, countless Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. So it makes sense to organize them. How and where do you start? We recommend some tips and some software that can simplify this task.
It is a good idea to start with duplicate file copies, such as bank statements, resumes, blurry photos of pet, etc. Duplicate files not create a mess, they also consume space. These files may be in multiple locations. The best way to find and manage them is by using Duplic8. This tool lets you select a folder, then mark or unmark duplicate files after which you can simply delete the ones you don’t want. Duplic8 has an advanced feature for defining a filter to search for duplicates. For example, if you set a filter such as ‘*.txt’ or ‘*.htm’, it filters out text files and html files at once.
Once the clutter is gone, you can start organizing. File Juggler is a utility that copies, renames, moves and deletes files and folders for you. It uses conditional formatting techniques such as ‘if-then statements’ to perform actions. First, plan out what you want to do with the files and folders. File Juggler has three sections – Monitor, If and Then. The first section lets you select the folder and subfolders to process. The second section lets you add a condition and lastly, choose an action. Actions can be renaming, moving, copying or deleting files and folders. You can download File Juggler here.
Organizing massive music collections are a pain. Many software use a default naming convention which can result in file names making no sense. Take for example, Track 1.MP3. TagScanner organizes your music collection by sorting music by artist, album, year of release, etc. It has a built-in array of customizations and settings running in the background. So all you need to do is browse or paste the path of your music folder and TagScanner sort your music for you. If needed, you can rename and reorganize music files in bulk. To know more about TagScanner, click here.
Most of us tons of photos consuming space on our laptops and PCs. Most of these photos aren’t named properly or resized. You can do this using a tool called IrfanView. It is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter. IrfanView lets you do batch conversion of photos. Navigate to File > Batch Conversion/Rename or simply press ‘B’ on the keyboard. Select the folders you want to rename and resize. Click on ‘Add’ and under the Work as: section, choose Batch Conversion – Rename result files. Under Batch rename settings, assign a name pattern for your photos. Next, select the output directory and the output format. That’s all. Also, IrfanView can move folders to a specific location using the F8 key. The best part about IrfanView is that you can create desktop icons or keyboard shortcuts to perform specific tasks. To know more about IrfanView, click here.
Adobe Lightroom offers a similar functionality. It offers many ways to organize photos using keywords, ratings and tags. It lets you tag photos and organize them into different folders. DarkTable is a free alternative which is worth checking out too.
Some of us even collect eBooks on our laptops or PCs. An organized bookshelf makes it easy to access your favourite eBooks. We recommend using Calibre for its excellent management features. Once saved, you can search for books by covers, titles, ratings, authors and publishers. Calibre supports major eBook formats, it lets you convert them from one format to another and it can even sync to eBook readers. In addition, it can also fetch and download the latest news and convert them into eBooks.
Now that you have everything in place, it’s a good idea to back up the important data. Use a pen drive or an external drive or you could use a secure cloud storage like JioCloud. It lets you access your data from any device such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC. You can easily avail 100GB of online storage and here is the link you can refer to know more about JioCloud.
