Desktop organizer
Encyclopedia
Desktop Organizer software applications are applications that automatically create useful organizational structures from desktop content from heterogeneous types of content including email, files, contacts, companies, RSS news feeds, photos, music and chat sessions. The organization is based on a combination of automated scanning of metadata
similar to data mining
and manual tagging of content. The metadata stored in applications is correlated based on a structure for the data type handled by the organizer tool. For example the email address of a sender of an email allows the email to be filed in a virtual folder
for the author and company the author works for or a music file is filed by the musician and album label. The resulting visualization simplifies use of desktop content to navigate, search, and use related information stored on the desktop computer. The data in desktop organizer tools is normally stored in a database
rather than the computer's file system
in order to produce virtual folders where the same item can appear in multiple folders to the user based on its relationship to the folder.
Desktop organizers are related to desktop search
because both sets of tools allow users to locate desktop resources. The primary differences between the two are that desktop organizers perform post-search functionality related to the primary purpose of the organizer, offer manual taxonomy
creation and tagging by the desktop user, and help gather additional related resources for taxonomy or related content from Internet resources.
, VoIP applications like Skype
, chat
, web browser
s, blog
s, RSS
and CRM
content relating to companies and contacts is often spread across multiple applications. Desktop communications organizers collect and correlate information stored in these applications.
Common features of communications organizers include:
s, picture organizers provide utilities to file and view pictures in folders and to tag pictures with metadata for future use. Picture organizers may also integrate with photo sharing
sites that also organize pictures but through a social network
.
There are two classes of picture organizers:
Presently, many commercial image organization software offer both automatic and manual picture organization features. A comparison of image viewers
reveals that many freely available software packages are available that offer most of the organization features available in commercial software. However, not all image viewer
s offer organizational tools. Popular picture organizers include Google
's Picasa
, DigiKam
, Adobe Systems
's Elements
, Apple
's iPhoto
, Phase One's Media Pro 1 and Novell
's F-spot
.
Common key organizational tools provided by picture organizers are:
Read more about Image Organizers
.
s and media players like Amarok, Rhythmbox
, Banshee
, Mediamonkey
, Songbird
, Apple
's iTunes
and Microsoft
's Windows Media Player
or Zune
. Organization is used to create playlists, or to organize the media collection into a folder hierarchy, by specific artists, albums, or genres.
Another type of the music organizers allows user to organize his media collection directly without listening of music. There are Ideal File Sorter, Automatic Music Organizer, Anti-Chaos and so forth.
By connecting the audio players to databases of tagged music to compare a collection with a professionally organized and tagged collection of music, MP3 collections can be enhanced with metadata corrections to support the organization process when metadata is not complete in the original items.
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
similar to data mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
and manual tagging of content. The metadata stored in applications is correlated based on a structure for the data type handled by the organizer tool. For example the email address of a sender of an email allows the email to be filed in a virtual folder
Virtual folder
In computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree...
for the author and company the author works for or a music file is filed by the musician and album label. The resulting visualization simplifies use of desktop content to navigate, search, and use related information stored on the desktop computer. The data in desktop organizer tools is normally stored in a database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
rather than the computer's file system
File system
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
in order to produce virtual folders where the same item can appear in multiple folders to the user based on its relationship to the folder.
Desktop organizers are related to desktop search
Desktop search
Desktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user's own computer files, rather than searching the Internet...
because both sets of tools allow users to locate desktop resources. The primary differences between the two are that desktop organizers perform post-search functionality related to the primary purpose of the organizer, offer manual taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
creation and tagging by the desktop user, and help gather additional related resources for taxonomy or related content from Internet resources.
Communications Organizers
Organization tools of contacts and correspondences involve the tracking and management of information stored in multiple communications tools. Due to the rise of computers for use in communications including emailEmail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, VoIP applications like Skype
Skype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...
, chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
, web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s, blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s, RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
and CRM
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
content relating to companies and contacts is often spread across multiple applications. Desktop communications organizers collect and correlate information stored in these applications.
Common features of communications organizers include:
- Connectivity through scanners and listeners to communications tools including email, chat, bookmarks, and VoIP
- RSS newsfeed subscriptions
- Filing of desktop files and documents
- Connectivity to desktop searchDesktop searchDesktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user's own computer files, rather than searching the Internet...
or desktop search capabilities - Virtual folders to locate the same item in multiple locations
- Workflow utilities to mark items for follow-up and annotate items
Picture Organizers
Also referred to as image viewerImage viewer
An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical image; it can often handle various graphics file formats...
s, picture organizers provide utilities to file and view pictures in folders and to tag pictures with metadata for future use. Picture organizers may also integrate with photo sharing
Photo sharing
Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user's digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others . This function is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images...
sites that also organize pictures but through a social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
.
There are two classes of picture organizers:
- Automatic picture organizers. These are software packages that read data present in digital pictures and use this data to automatically create an organization structure. Each digital picture contains information about the date when the picture was taken. It is this piece of information that serves as the basis for automatic picture organization. The user usually has little or no control over the automatically created organization structure. Some tools create this structure on the hard drive (physical structure), while other tools create a virtual structure (it exists only within the tool).
- Manual picture organizers. This kind of software provides a direct view of the folders present on a user's hard disk. Sometimes referred to as image viewerImage viewerAn image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical image; it can often handle various graphics file formats...
s, they only allow the user to see the pictures but do not provide any automatic organization features. They give maximum flexibility to a user and show exactly what the user has created on his hard drive. While they provide maximum flexibility, manual organizers rely on the user to have his/her own method to organize their pictures. Currently there are two main methods for organizing pictures manually: tag and folder based methods. While not mutually exclusive, these methods are different in their methodology, outcome and purpose.
Presently, many commercial image organization software offer both automatic and manual picture organization features. A comparison of image viewers
Comparison of image viewers
This article presents a comparison of image viewers and image organizers which can be used for image viewing.-General information:Note 1: Adobe Bridge comes included in the price with the Adobe Creative Suite CS2, Adobe Production Studio and Photoshop Elements 4 for Mac OS X...
reveals that many freely available software packages are available that offer most of the organization features available in commercial software. However, not all image viewer
Image viewer
An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical image; it can often handle various graphics file formats...
s offer organizational tools. Popular picture organizers include Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
's Picasa
Picasa
Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...
, DigiKam
DigiKam
digiKam is an image organizer and editor using KDE Platform. It runs on most known desktop environments and window managers if the required libraries are installed. It supports all major image file formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by...
, Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
's Elements
Adobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe Photoshop Elements is the consumer version of the Adobe Photoshop raster image editing product, targeted at hobbyist users and hence sold at a fraction of the cost of the professional product. It contains most of the features of the professional version but with fewer and simpler options...
, Apple
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's iPhoto
IPhoto
iPhoto is a digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. and released with every Macintosh personal computer as part of the iLife suite of digital life management applications...
, Phase One's Media Pro 1 and Novell
Novell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...
's F-spot
F-Spot
F-Spot is an image organizer, designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. The name is a play on the words F-Stop and G-Spot.-Features:...
.
Common key organizational tools provided by picture organizers are:
- Organization by date or date range
- Tagging of pictures with attributes including location, people, and
- Storing the same picture in multiple virtual folders
- Rating of pictures
Read more about Image Organizers
Image organizer
An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organizing digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications.- Common image organizers features :...
.
Music Organizers
Music contains unique attributes such as artist, album, genre, era, and song title used to organize the songs. The desktop organization of music is primarily embedded into audio playerAudio player (software)
An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, audio files and streaming audio....
s and media players like Amarok, Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. However, Rhythmbox functions on desktop environments other than GNOME.-Music...
, Banshee
Banshee (music player)
Banshee is an open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players,...
, Mediamonkey
MediaMonkey
MediaMonkey is a proprietary digital media player and media library application developed by Ventis Media Inc., for organizing and playing audio on Microsoft Windows operating systems. By using plugins, it can be extended to handle video and other media formats as well.MediaMonkey is available in a...
, Songbird
Songbird (software)
Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser, with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."...
, Apple
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
and Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player is a media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices...
or Zune
Zune
Zune is a digital media brand owned by Microsoft which includes a line of portable media players, a digital media player software for Windows machines, a music subscription service known as a 'Zune Music Pass', music and video streaming for the Xbox 360 via the Zune Software, music, TV and movie...
. Organization is used to create playlists, or to organize the media collection into a folder hierarchy, by specific artists, albums, or genres.
Another type of the music organizers allows user to organize his media collection directly without listening of music. There are Ideal File Sorter, Automatic Music Organizer, Anti-Chaos and so forth.
By connecting the audio players to databases of tagged music to compare a collection with a professionally organized and tagged collection of music, MP3 collections can be enhanced with metadata corrections to support the organization process when metadata is not complete in the original items.