Symbolic Links, Double Commander, and Daz Studio
JQP
Posts: 520
For years I've wanted a way to make virtual folders a part of Daz Studio, the way they are natively a part of Advanced Library. AL just died on me, and nothing I tried got it working again, so I was forced to go looking for something to replace it. I'd always heard about symbolic links, but I always approached the issue of replacing AL in a very ADD way (if it didn't make sense to me in like a minute in a half I just went back to using AL). But since I was forced to delve further this time, I looked around and got lucky: Double Commander is a free file manager that 1) has a double-paned layout 2) will quickly create symbolic links for you 3) allows you to easily assign a hotkey to create those links. In other words, it makes creating symbolic links very quick and easy. In fact, it seems a bit easier than it was in AL (I assume AL used the same basic windows functions).
I just made a quick setup and tested it in DS, and it works fine. I don't know if this will scale well, but my guess is it will. IMO this is yuuuuge; it grants the ability to set up your content folders EXACTLY the way you want to, without actually moving anything in your windows directory. E.g., a Clothing folder containing a G1 Clothing folder, a G2F Clothing folder, a G3F clothing folder, etc. Unfortunately it's not quite as versatile as AL because I don't think there's a way to "blend" folders the way AL can (if you add two folders to a single virtual folder in AL, all the contents are displayed in the virtual folder, and I don't know how to (quickly) do that with symbolic links), which is useful if you want to do big virtual directories with all your clothes, or all your hair, etc. But otherwise this is really great, IMO.
Just wanted to share that for anyone who, like me, really wanted a way to use "virtual" folders in DS' content library, as well as an easy way to set everything up.
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Comments
I've used symbolic links a lot when I don't like the location of something, but changing it would affect the software I'm using in weird ways. But I honestly hadn't thought of making the link say from my G3 Female clothing to my G8 Female clothing. I'm going to have to play with this some to see how it effects things like compatibilty settings, etc. it is very intriguing though!
Yeah it's pretty cool. As I said, I don't know of any way to put the contents of multiple folders into a single virtual folder, which would really make this perfect. I don't remember how Windows' "libraries" work, but I suppose that's the next thing I'll have to check out. Too bad symbolic links don't let you point multiple directories at them (AFAIK).
As for compatibility, I've been using it for a few hours loading lots of content of various types and it's working perfectly. I have no idea how it works with all the "meta" stuff because I don't use any of Daz' organizational functionality at all.
One thing I really like is that it doesn't rely on Daz Studio at all - you make everything in File Explorer, then just point Daz Studio at it. So there's no finicky proprietary data to lose.
Another cool feature that Advanced Library has that I haven't seen duplicated is that it displays thumbnails for Windows shortcuts to Poser/Daz content. You create a shortcut and put it wherever you want and it looks just like the original, no need to copy the thumbnail. DS just displays an exclamation point, and you have to drag and drop to get it to load content, double-clicking just gets an error.
Surely a category is a virtual folder? You can create them to mimic the existing folder structure just by right-click on the top-level folder. Unlike symbolic links, categories can be backed up and - since the CMS uses relative paths in DS 4.9+ - transferred to another machine. DS also has its own shortcuts, .djl files, which will show thumbnails in the content folders (as long as the file they are pointing to exists); they can be created by dragging from Smart Content.
I haven't messed with any of those features in DS for a while, but if memory serves, categories don't update when the folder does? E.g., I make a category out of G3F>Clothing folder, but if I add another product to the directory, it doesn't show up in the category, if I delete a product it isn't removed, etc. Has this changed?
I guess I could just mess around with categories and find out for myself... :)
The shortcut things sounds very cool, I definitely have to mess around with that.
Edit: yeah I just checked and categories don't update when I change something in windows and then refresh the category. Not sure if this is expected behavior or not, but it means categories aren't particularly useful to me, as I'm always moving, renaming, adding, saving, etc., in my content directories and need something that keeps up in real time.