Finding and categorizing new content in DS 4.9
MorganRLewis
Posts: 233
I apologize if, as I suspect, this is a topic forum regulars are already sick of, but Google has failed to provide me with a complete answer.
A couple months back, my old computer went kaput. I had enough warning to backup my third-party library and my personal creations, but not my Daz library nor the database. I have recently gotten a new computer, and have installed DS 4.9 for the first time (4.9.2.70, to be precise). And I am now thoroughly lost.
Smart Content has never been terribly helpful for me; it doesn't contain but a small portion of my content by default, and it doesn't organize that content in a way that makes a lot of sense to me. I've always preferred using the Content Library and organizing by my own categories. The trouble is that in order to do this effectively I have to be able to easily identify newly-installed items. On older versions of DS this wasn't hard; there was a blue highlight on folders that contained new items. I understand from a bit of searching that this has been done away with for some reason (it was not, in my opinion, buggy enough to warrant wholesale removal, but that's an argument for another day). I need to know what functionality has replaced that.
I see checking preferences that Content Library has an option to Assign New Products to "New" Group, but although I have it checked, when I install items through DIM it doesn't do it; I've installed a couple items, and checked on them in the Content Library, and they aren't assigned to "New". Sure, I can do that manually right now, but that's only feasible while I still only have a couple items installed, and it sort of defeats the purpose anyway, since I want to use the "New" marker to find stuff to categorize. Installing through Connect will group it as "New", but this won't help with third-party content or anything else that's not Connect-ready (if such exists); and at any rate, I prefer not to use Connect when possible, as my limited trials with it so far indicate that DIM handles my slow-and-intermittent internet connection better.
What's more, even when items are grouped as new, I can't find out what to do with it. I can't find where the group is used anywhere to sort or filter items.
What I need to know is how to ensure that any item newly installed -- be it through Connect (for those few items that require it), DIM, or manually (for third-party/mine) -- be somehow designated as newly installed, and to use that designation to find it so I can categorize however I want. If that's through groups or some other means doesn't really matter to me much, so long as whatever approach there is, is consistently applied to all new items and findable. Right now, I'm lost, and feeling a tad discouraged. It's going to take me weeks to re-install everything under the best of circumstances; I don't want it to take twice as long to sort it all out, nor do I want to risk losing new items in the shuffle once my full library is in place (which happened now and then in the bad old days before the Content Library marking things as new.)
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Comments
Yeah the lack of the blue New in 4.9 is the BIG thing stopping me upgrading. I have the Beta installed on 2 computers and have tried to use Smart Content, it just drives me nuts. I don't want to see the DAZ animals I own when I click on my top level Animals, I want to see them the way I have them in my Content Library where I burrow down to them, which makes more sense to me. Yes I can still burrow down in Smart Content, but I don't want to see them all at each level. I also want to see all the animals I own, not just the DAZ ones with metadata - and since I hate the way Smart Content works I am not going to create metadata for all my freebies and 3rd party content. I want to render pictures not spend time doing data entry every time I want to add a freebie. I never found the blue New buggy, I found it a gem to quickly catagorise all the folders of a new install in a couple of clicks. The work-a-rounds I've been given are allot more work and would take twice as long as the blue New ever did. The lack of it in the future is making me feel very discouraged about the whole DAZ Studio experience and reluctant to even open it - and I am still on 4.8! What is the point of buying new DAZ3D content even if I can't find it to catagorise easily if I eventually move to 4.9.
Smart Content>Products will sort by Install Date. Your can also use Group::New in the filter box to show only items in that group.
It was very buggy, it didn't work, that I ever noticed, for manually installed content, and until you actually used something, it would remain marked new, even after installing "newer" content. I'm actually glad they got rid of it, if it was going to be more time-consuming to fix than what the users that wanted that realized.
Well, it ain't pretty, but after a bit of testing, I think that will work. Thank you, Richard.
Daywalker03 said:
I never had a problem with it. For manually installed content, everything was marked new, as appropriate, after scanning for new files. And keeping stuff marked new until you mark it otherwise is proper behavior -- otherwise if you install two things right after another, you'd be unmarking a new item before you saw it. (I never had to use an item to mark it as no longer new; I just had to click on it, or select "Mark as Seen".) The only bug I ever observed was that sometimes a category would keep the blue highlight after everything in it was marked seen, and that was easily fixed by selecting "Refresh" -- a trivial workaround for a minor bug.
Not pretty and doesn't work without metadata. The Group::New filter found nothing for me just after I had installed something with DIM, and I do have the "Assign as New..." ticked.
That is how I used it too and I'd be happy with that. It was a one stop shop for catagorising any content - which there isn't now in 4.9
I would have thought it would automatically scan files during startup (that's how I would have programmed the feature, anyway) to find new ones and have previously installed ones unchecked, not have to do it manually; that's not useful behaviour to me. So I guess it's a difference in expectations of how the feature should function more than a bug.
I have left 4.8 on my laptop just so I can find the new content I put on both my laptop and my pc. The pc has the 4.9 and its horrible to try and find anything. I leave 4.8 on my laptop because the blue bars work perfectly for me. They stay until I tell them to go away. I have no problem finding my product. I load it on the laptop then I load it on the pc and use the laptop as a guide to find it on the pc or I would never find my new content. I won't touch smart content with a ten foot pole. most of the time the group new does not work for me and I have far too much content to try and find it by scrolling through. I will keep 4.8 on my laptop until they come up with something that actually works again. I can't scroll through thousands of items to try and find a prop I just loaded. I never really understood what they thought was wrong with it. My new stuff shows up as blue until I mark all content as seen then it goes away. Super easy and haven't missed a product yet.
I have DAZ 4.8 and DAZ 4.9 installed parallel to each other, and have a bunch of stuff categorized. I miss the blue bar in DAZ 4.9, but indeed manually installed content usually didn't mark itself by default in 4.8, so I understand it was a bit buggy.
What I don't understand is why my categories got messed up in DAZ 4.9. I mean, it finds all the categories just fine. But at least half of them are just empty. And when I tried to re-categorize an existing categorised folder (just saying make a category of this folder and put it where the same folder used to be) it still shows up empty. Maybe I should delete the old category folder first, haven't tried it yet, but it's annoying even if it would work.
Another stupid thing: I used to have a different content folder in DAZ 4.8, one I had before DIM. It was mapped (because I didn't want to delete it at first, it had some custom skins for Genesis I made) together with the default DIM folder. At some point I unmapped it. But the search function of DAZ 4.8 still kept finding items inside it, which basically meant finding all items double. Then I deleted the damn folder, and DAZ 4.8 still didn't get the message. Now it will keep finding it, but showing a broken link. Moreover, some of the categorised content (of which I'm sure I categorised from within the default DIM folder) aparently were linking to the old content folder, so now they show broken links in the categories.
I'm now tending to uninstall DAZ 4.8, freshly install 4.9 and start over with the categories. From scratch.
Removing a content diectory won't remove files that are in it from the database - there are too many ways that a dierctory could be unavailable temporarily, and people wouldn't want files removed in those situations. Are you sure that the files are being found anew and not being remembered from when that was a content directory (in which case you need to remove them from the database)?
I have no idea how to tell those two apart. I presume it's a left-over from the time it was mapped and actually existed on my hard drive.
So, how do I remove it from the database? I already unmapped it from "Content Directory Manager", is there a way to clear it somehow differently?
Can you find it in the products list in the Content Library pane? If so theer should be a command in the right-click menu.
I can't find it "manually", as in it's not located in Content Library anymore. But if I search in the search bar in Content Library for an item, it will find me that item and show a broken link (of course it's broken, it's not on my hdd anymore).
Use the Products list, not DAZ Studio Formats (or Poser Formats).