Disk Explorer is a tool for cataloging all CDs, DVDs, floppies, ZIP disks, or other removable media, hard drives, network drives, or even FTP servers on the Internet. It was created by Tomas Jelinek and it is free to use for non-commercial purposes.
The installation process takes only a few seconds, and then you'll be prompted to choose an action. You can create a new database, specifying the number of volumes to include, you can choose a password to protect your database, then you have to select the destination folder where it will be saved. For some users this may seem a little awkward, but it's not that bad. This is an easy process and offers full control on your database.
What I like most about this software is the numerous built-in filters that are responsible for extracting informations from your files. There are 17 filters which can extract for example song/interpreter/album name from MP3 or OGG files; size, bit-depth, format and even thumbnail from images of over 40 file formats (JPG, GIF, TIF, PNG, BMP, PCX, CDR etc.); properties of various sound files; obtain title, keywords, author, statistics from office documents (such as MS Word and Excel); title from HTML documents; or just copyright holder, name and version from executables. It can also show contents of archived files (ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CAB, TAR/GZIP, ACE, JAR and others) including self-extracting installers (EXE). Comments can be added to any volume or folder. All filters are fully configurable, and different file types can be associated to any filter.
Disk Explorer has file management capabilities, thus you can sort files by name, rating, title, type, size, date, and you can view them as large or small thumbnails, as well as a list or in detailed mode.
Files can be launched with the associated applications directly from this program, when you double-click on one.
There's not all. The search engine of this fine application can look for files or folders using various criteria, such as file name wildcards, substring, regular expression, date, time, file attributes. And it does a nice job too, and very quickly.
Because Disk Explorer can work with many databases simultaneously, you can move the volumes from one database to another. Most of the data will be compressed, so your database will be small in size.
You may want to check out
Where Is It?, because it is very similar to Disk Explorer.
Pluses: It can show detailed information of the files and even thumbnails from pictures.
Drawbacks / flaws: There is something that's missing to this great program though: you cannot specify whether a disc is borrowed from or lent to someone. I find that important, because I always forget where I put things, or whom I gave them to.
In conclusion: A very good program, that you must have.
version reviewed: 3.60.f7
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