CDFinder Video Tutorial: Find your stuff



The whole purpose of CDFinder is to find and locate your digital photos, movies, songs and other files, regardless of where they are actually stored..
To help you with that, there are plenty of ways to find your files.



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Find your stuff with CDFinder

The whole purpose of CDFinder is to find and locate your digital photos, movies, songs and other files, regardless of where they are actually stored..

To help you with that, there are plenty of ways to find your files.

The first one is located right in the main window, called Quick Find. Type in what you are looking for, in this example search for "Supertramp". Hit return, and CDFinder shows you everything it knows about this famous Pop band. As you see, this includes songs, photos, and other items.

Did you notice that CDFinder even found items that don't have the term Supertramp in their name? That is because Quick Find searches all fields in the database. In this case, the MP3 tags of this song file contained the band name in the Artist field.

If you need more control over what CDFinder finds for you, the Find window is the place to go. Here you can set up the parameters for any query that CDFinder can handle. First, in this menu, you define in which catalogs CDFinder will search, either in all of them, or in those with a particular label, or in any selected catalog, or just the already found items or the catalog info.

Then you set up what you are looking for. "Any Text contains" is essentially the same as the Quick Find. So let's get fancy: Tell CDFinder we only wish to see photos in our result. Here we go!
Lots of concert photos of Roger Hodgson, the founder of Supertramp.

Switch back the Kind to "Song" and get only music as the result. Some of my song files even already have cover art and lyrics!

Then change the Type to Picture again, and in the first parameter, tell it to Find IPTC "Caption contains" Arizona. Surprisingly, we see photos taken at Pearl Harbour, Hawai'i. But the Inspector quickly tells us that this is the memorial of the battleship Arizona. Aha!

Do yourself a favor and look at all the Find parameters that CDFinder offers for you. There are file name related options, anything you need for photos, IPTC, EXIF, plenty of stuff for audio (MP3 tags), the duration of songs and video, and much more.
And since you can have up to 16 parameters in a single query, you will definitely be able to build the most intricate queries ever.

One especially mighty option is the Path parameter, as that allows you to find any items located in certain folders and all their subfolders. Combined with other parameters, that is very helpful in locating files of a particular client, for example.

And as a special treat, CDFinder even searches the Spotlight database of local files for you, if you wish. So you get the best of both worlds in one place!

But that wasn't all! There is more!

Use the context menu for any file, and you get a whole set of custom Find options to locate similar items.
For photos, that contains date, name, and GPS options.
For songs, the Find context menu contains artist, title, and album based stuff. This allows you to quickly search for related materials in CDFinder.

Now, what can you do with the Found Items? Well, simply drag a photo from CDFinder into Apples Pages, or Microsoft Office, or Adobe inDesign to place it on the current document.
Or drag a file into the Finder to copy it to that location.
Or just hit the space bar in Leopard to open the QuickLook window for the file, if it is currently online.
Or export all geotagged photos as KMZ.
Or just reveal the file in the Finder.
Or upload photos to the Locr community.
You get the picture...

And that isn't even all! CDFinder can launch a Find operation by using AppleScript, so you can for example access your CDFinder catalogs from a FileMaker Database.
Also, CDFinder understands several URL query commands. Just click on one of the special links next to this video as an example.


CDFinder - The Search is Over!