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It's time to make things easier on yourself. If you use Windows, you can catalog all your CDs, store them safely and browse through a catalog of their contents.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Catalog the data and image CDs you create with 'Where Is It'

Easy-to-use cataloging program creates thumbnails of each image, has searchable list


Jan. 21 , 2001

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2001 Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2001, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Like many of you, I store my digital images on CDs. With blank CDs so cheap (a stack of 50 costs $30 or so), I make sure I copy every one of my digital-camera photos onto a CD. I also copy every photo I scan.
   That way, no matter what happens to the original photos, I have copies. A hard drive crash can't wipe out a lifetime of memories. You could say the CD copies are a form of insurance.
   I copy all the photos I've touched up and edited, too. I always have copies of both my originals and my edited versions. If you take digital photography seriously, making archival copies is the smart thing to do.
   Making copies is easy. The hard part comes when you have to locate a photo. Typically, you end up with a stack of CDs that might or might not be labeled in some sort of helpful way.
   Let's suppose CD No. 37 has a file called DSC01752.JPG. Is that a picture of Uncle Harry toasting Aunt Mildred at their 25th wedding anniversary? Or is it a photo of the sign at the entrance to Hohukum Springs Provincial Park? Or -- drats! -- is it one of those bad exposures your brother-in-law took the day it snowed at the Giants' game?
   It's time to make things easier on yourself. If you use Windows, you can catalog all your CDs, store them safely and browse through a catalog of their contents.
   The program that does this the best is "Where Is It," by Robert Galle of Slovenia in Eastern Europe. It costs $40. You can download it and try it for free from http://www.whereisit-soft.com.
   My wife, Nancy, and I have used Where Is It since 1997 to make easy-to-search catalogs of our backup CDs and our program-installation CDs. Finding old files was easy.
   But it wasn't until recently that we took advantage of improvements in Where Is It to create a hassle-free database of all our digital images. These improvements made a world of difference, because now we're able to view full-color thumbnails (small versions of the original images) just by opening the catalogs in Where Is It.
   You probably won't believe how easy this is. Here's how Where Is It works:
   You pop a CD into your CD-ROM drive and fire up Where Is It. If you haven't already created a catalog, you tell the program to make a new one. You click a button and Where Is It makes a note of everything on the disk. It even looks inside archived files (files that are zipped, for example) and installation files ("exe" files that contain other files).
   When that CD is cataloged, you put another CD in and add it to the same catalog or to a different one.
   When you want to find a file, you run Where Is It and use the Search function. You can search for the names of folders or files, of course. But you can also search for descriptions -- brief texts that often accompany programs you've downloaded and software you bought on CD. Description files usually have names such as "readme.txt" something similar. (Where Is It will search for your own custom description file, too, so you can add descriptions to each file folder and have them cataloged automatically.)
   But these descriptions don't just show up in a search. They're automatically visible along with the filenames in the main window and they even pop up when your mouse pointer passes over the name.
   But the best part of Where Is It for digital photographers is the way it creates and displays thumbnail versions of each image in your collection. Hold your mouse pointer over the filename of an image and Where is It pops up a miniature version of the photo. You can choose the thumbnail size and quality for each catalog.
   Where Is It can make thumbnails of Windows icons, too, whether they are stored in regular icon files or hidden inside program files.
   To view or copy a file you've located in a catalog, you make note of the CD disk number shown on the screen, locate that CD, put it in the CD-ROM drive and click on the filename in the catalog. Where is It shows you a menu of options for editing, viewing or copying the file. You can customize the software so that a double click opens the file, copies it or simply shows more information about it.
   Catalogs can get fairly large (some of ours are 50 to 100 megabytes in size), but Where Is It has no problem handling big catalogs even on Windows PCs that don't have much memory. I've been using a five-year-old IBM Aptiva with 48 megabytes of memory to create our catalogs without a problem. The Aptiva is even able to do other tasks such as word processing while creating catalogs.
   A few other file-cataloging programs are available for Windows. I tried all I could locate, but they were no match for Where is It. Also coming up short was a file-catalog program for the Linux KDE graphical interface. I didn't try any Macintosh file-cataloging software, but Mac owners should be able to find any that are available by searching Mac file sites.