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When you open DIM and logged into your store account, the Ready to Download tab should be populated with all the files you can download. Just out of interest, do you have any files in the Ready to Install tab?
As for keeping the files or not, if you delete the files after a scan, it may remove them from the database if it can't find them with the next scan. What you can do, and yes, it is a bit of work.
Let's say you have downloaded and scanned a 100 files, and the database is in a folder D:\Catalog\. When you delete all the downloaded files, don't perform another scan. If you want to download and scan another 100 files, first change the data folder location, e.g. D:\Catalog1\. Now when you scan, the database will be in the new location. Rinse and repeat for each batch of downloads and scans. So when you want to find something, you can just specify the required data folder.
Ready To Download won't, as far as I know, show products that have been installed - only those that are neither already downloaded* nor installed.
* actually, unless something has changed it won't show the file if there is a package .dsx in the downloads folder or an install .dsx file in the Manifests folder - which is a way to get update notices without having to have the zip taking up disc space.
Ah, yes. If it's already installed, and the delete after installation was selected, then it won't show those in the Download tab. The only way to show those is to delete the installed .dsx files in the Manifests folder.
Yes, Ready to Download is populated with all the files I can download, but those are actually the files that I don't want downloaded/installed (parts of bundles I wasn't interested in, etc.).
All products I want to and use are already in my Installed tab. Installed and ready to use. I don't do "Install only what you need at the time" thing I've seen recommended sometimes. I have "all" (except the ones I have no interest in as stated above) products I own installed at all times.
I do not have any files in the Ready to Install tab, because: they are instantly installed once they are downloaded and the packages are deleted once the install is complete, because I don't need them (I only reinstall packages when they are updates) and I don't really have space to store them.
Is it possible to merge the folders afterward? Because otherwise, if I understand it correctly, the solution works only for what I currently own, and will cause the issues down the road, where I either create countless catalogues for the 1-15 I bought in one batch, or don't catalogue items until I reach a set of 100 (or whatever number I'd choose).
And it goes without saying: thank you for taking time to write those replies. Usually, I'm good with what's provided in the Daz store's description, but this time, as it turns out, I'm full of questions.
After Richard pointed out something in the previous post, I realized that there might be even more work involved. To download the installed files, you'll have to delete the corresponding .dsx files in the Manifest folder for installed products.
You can catalogue items until you decide it's time for a new data folder because you have e.g. a 100 product zips in the DIM downloads folder. It is not currently possible to merge the folders afterwards. However, you gave me an idea and it is something which I'll be looking into.
Thanks for the reply.
Not all of them are stored as ZIP files.
But shouldn't the program skip them or display a corresponding error message with details?
It should, but testing was only done with zip archive files. I'll work on this for the next update.
How long does this Content Catalog app take to scan say '1000' zip files for display in the output? That would be my main concern. I would think a large folder could easily take multiple hours to scan.
Thank you so much for all the answers. At this stage, it feels that using your product is just going to be too involved for me. :) No shade on your product (I still think it's awesome), because from the beginning, I had a feeling it wouldn't work for me because of the zips requirement. I was hoping for some easy workaround, but it doesn't seem to be one, which is fine.
I really appreciate your response, and I appreciate that you're not only knowledgeable but also always willing to help. Thank you for extending that to me too.
I honestly have no clue how what you just told me works (due to Daz's lack of documentation, I never got to learn how to look "under the hood" when it comes to Daz), but the steps seem easy enough and they are understandable so I feel like I do have a clue, lol, and it would definitely solve the issue of the time consuming download.
Sadly, it seems that unless I keep the zips, I'll be bumping into other problems. I really want to get that product, because it feels perfect for what I'd need... but apparently, I'm not setup to use it, lol.
Not that long. It depends on system specs, but 11840 files took roughly 10 minutes on an older system. That is the initial scan, subsequent scans take seconds.
Is that 11840 scanned files, or 11840 scanned zip files? There is a difference,
EDIT - RELATIVE Speed question has already been answered.
I would think that would vary greatly depending on your definition of a large folder and, more importantly, how much was included in each zip that it had to scan. I have a fast computer and just reloaded my Taozen Content Manager and it took three days, and that was a fast scan compared to some of the other 3D content management products I've tried in the past. On the other hand, think of how long it would take you to do that manually...
That said, I can think of one add-on that would make this an even more powerful product... automatic formatting to DIM ready files or a similar automatic installing system, though that's probably a pipe-dream.
It took me a bit to track it down, (had to reopen DIM to find where it was stored there is no Read Me posted). Once I did I located it in General/DJB/... and saw the .dmg. I was good to go.After install and I had my drives up so I knew for sure where I wanted to store the content and where DIM files were, it was easy. I let it run while I had dinner. Wonderful. Love the user interface, very easy to manage. Need to track down the User Manual tomorrow.
Thank you both @Doctorjellybean and @Code66.
Maybe some sort of Export/Import function could be added in an update. or add-on product, to support transferring from one OS version to another. I know several Daz customers use both types of computers, but probably not a large percentage of customers. You'd have to estimate whether the sales volume would recoup the effort that it would take to implement something like that.
Open DIM and right click on Content Catalog (Windows or Mac) and select Show Installed Files. It will open a window with links to all of the product's installed files. The first one in the list is the Content Catalog User Guide.pdf. Mine (Windows) is in C:\Program Files\Doctor Jellybean\Content Catalog Windows, same folder as the .exe.
Does the folder you scanned contain all 60,000 DIM zip files, or were some possibly moved, or deleted, or downloaded to a different folder?
I have 4580 zips, they are from all the major stores: Daz, RHub, Renderosity, R*otica, Sharecg, 3dshards, artstation, etc. Total size of all the zip files scanned was 586GB, no idea how many actual files are within those zips. I did the initial scan in 1 minute and 26 seconds. Also my DIM zips are all stored on a Samsung SSD 860 EVO 4TB, so what hard drive you have is going to be probably the most important factor I think. Also my PC is running windows 10 on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8 core processor, 32GB of RAM. So its nothing special, the PC is about 6 years old at least. The app is very fast I highly recommend it.
Thank you! Can i make one other suggestion? A way to bookmark or save frequent searches would be great. For example, if I want to find all the vehicles I own I might put a search in the bar like: "automobile OR car OR bus OR motorcyle OR bike OR vehicle OR truck"
It would be great to be able to pull up that search very quickly instead of retypling it each time I need it.
Yikes, that's fast. But what does it do when it hits a zip that doesn't fit normal formatting... just skip it, flag it, or stop the scan? A lot of older and non-professionally made zip files can be really weird, or compressed with some other format other than zip.
Scanned Zip files. Content Catalog only scans Zip files.
For making the zips downloadable, first select all in the Ready To Download tab, right-click>Hide Packages>All Selected. Then just rename the manifests folder (or point DIM to an empty folder for the Manifests Archive via Advanced Settings). Everything you want should then be visible in the ready To Download folder, so download, run the tool, then restore thje manifests folder. Ready to Download will then be empty, so enable Show Hidden, select all, right-click>Unhide Packages>All Selected and the staus quo should be as before (unless you had actually hidden stuff).
"But what does it do when it hits a zip that doesn't fit normal formatting... just skip it, flag it, or stop the scan? "
That I am not sure about, mine all scanned with no errors, but I religiously use DoctorJellyBean's Content Package Assist to make all my content from other stores into DIM zips. So there is that. I can't really imagine handling content from other stores without CPA.
It did flag 94 items for not having creators identified, but it doesn't stop the scan for that, it gives you a message at the end and then you can take care of it in a couple ways. For the creator issue, you just click on the drop down for the creator field and there is a flag called "Needs Attention". Fixing them is really fast since there is a link to take you to the zip file, you can quickly open the file if you forget who the creator is, and then manually add the creator. This is of course a place where a bulk editing option would be nice, but its pretty fast even doing it one by one.
DoctorJellybean said earlier that it doesn't scan RAR files. He mention one other format it doesn't handle either, but it skips my mind. I have scanned Renderosity products and Hivewire products today, and both had Zip files and both scanned into my Content Catalog fine. Content Catalog did not fill in the Creator, so I had to add that manually for each such product. I also manually added some tags that I felt were important to me, Including Renderosity, Hivewire,flower, plant, shader, etc. Some of the thumbnails for those products were a little questionable, so I may create new ones for them when I get around to it. I can probably get a product promo image from Renderosity for those products.
DoctorJellybean already has another product in the Daz Store to do that. It is Content Package Assist. It's several years old, but still works great.
One more thing, I really like how intuitive the UI is for Content Catalog. I really didn't even need to consult the PDF. If something is not intuitive to use, I just can't get into it at all. Of course intutiveness might be subjecive, some people love Blender for example, I've always had a hard time with that UI, though I am slowly getting into it. But I could tell right away I would love Content Catalog. I no longer feel blind to my content, especially from all the other stores. I'm finding lots of stuff I completely forgot about. I'm finding some double installs of things that I got at 2 different sites when PAs moved (not too many of them fortunately, but I did find a couple.) Of course thats my own fault for taking a long break from Daz and then coming back.
@joanna, Richard Haseline's suggestion this evening would work just as well as my suggestion. It might be a little faster. Either way, you should be sure your computer has enough space to store all the Zip files that you would be downloading again. They can add up to a lot ot space! If you want to pursue it, just ask and I can post some screenshots for you that could help. If it is too much hassle for you, don't be afraid to just decide not to tackle it. Don't feel pressured into doing all this. It is only necessary if you decide that Content Catalog would really be useful to you.
I hadn't thought of that double install from different stores issue, but Content Catalog could really help you avoid that in the future, if you are consistent about adding all your products from other stores as well as Daz. Then you could take a quick look at Content Catalog before purchasing and see if you already have it from some other store. Thanks for bringing up this situation.
I think we should suggest that a forum mod move these Content Catalog discussions to the official PA thread. (Richard Haseltine is really skilled at doing that, although it can be a lot of work!) That is really where people would normally go to find questions and answers that have been posted here.
Yes probably a good idea if it's not too much trouble.