HoudahSpot 5.0 is finally here. Yes, it has a new icon. Yes, it supports Dark Mode on macOS Mojave.
HoudahSpot packs a lot of enhancements that have you find files faster than ever before. We looked at every step of the search workflow and made sure HoudahSpot does its best to get you to the files you need.
Todd Olthoff of ScreenCastsOnline takes you on a tour of HoudahGeo 5.
HoudahGeo is an application that streamlines adding location and other metadata to your files. The best part is that it writes that information to the files themselves instead of the library’s catalog.
Todd walks you through the various ways to get photos into HoudahGeo and then covers all of the geocoding and metadata options. You also will learn how to add metadata to the files and share them with outside libraries. Exporting that added information to other services that read them is covered in the last section of the show.
Continue reading ScreenCastsOnline: HoudahGeo Video Tutorial
Whether you’re working on a novel, writing a college paper, or preparing a legal case: You collect information from various sources, e.g. the web, specialized databases, or on paper. You organize your collection; you give it a structure; find connections. Finally you process the accumulated knowledge to create something new.
DEVONthink is there for you all the way. DEVONthink is a smart document management solution for Mac. It lets you organize and work with all your documents — bookmarks, email messages, text files, images, PDFs — in one place, regardless where they come from. Continue reading Special Offer on DEVONthink
Searching by file size can be very useful – not only to find and clean out large files, but also to limit search results to files large enough to be relevant.
When you add a new file size criterion to your HoudahSpot search, it defaults to searching for files that match a size you specify in MB. When searching for files larger than 1 GB, you might be tempted to type 1000 so as to avoid reaching for the mouse to change the unit from MB to GB.
Actually, there is a much easier way.
Continue reading Quickly Switch Between File Size or Time Units
In HoudahSpot, you can choose between hundreds of criteria to search for files. HoudahSpot also lets you specify in which folders to search and how to sort results.
Lots of options to choose from – and settings you don’t want to make over and again.
Search criteria, results display, and sort order are a matter of personal preference and habits. You may, for example, find yourself frequently searching for files by file name extension. You may prefer to search your full hard drive rather than just your home folder. You may want search results to always list file size.
Let’s see how you can set up HoudahSpot so that a fresh search window matches your preferred way of searching.
This post applies to DEVONthink Pro (Office). Users of DEVONthink 3 should refer to the updated version of this post. For DEVONthink 4, refer to the post titled “Supercharge Your DEVONthink 4 Search with HoudahSpot”
DEVONthink is a smart document management solution for Mac. It lets you organize and work with all your documents — bookmarks, email messages, text files, images, PDFs — in one place, regardless where they come from.
Now that you have all your documents stored and organized in DEVONthink, you can rely on both DEVONthink and HoudahSpot to always find the piece of information you need.
Continue reading Search DEVONthink Databases using HoudahSpot
There is an updated version of this post.
Scanning paper documents to PDF files lets you archive important (and not so important) documents without filling up cabinets.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes these scanned documents much more useful than their paper originals. Once a scan has been processed by OCR, the PDF file contains both an image of the document and an invisible text version. The text can then be searched using HoudahSpot.
Unfortunately, you will find that not all of your PDF files have text content. You may have forgotten to run them through OCR. Or you may have received the scanned document from someone else.
How can you find these files and rectify this?
With a little trick, HoudahSpot can find PDF files that lack text content. It is safe to assume that any text contains either a space or a period. Thus, we will be looking for any PDF file that contains neither space or period.
This translates to the following search:
MacOS file metadata holds many useful and diverse file facts. This is not limited to file size, extension or creation date. Depending on the type and the application that created it, there is a whole lot of information available on a file’s properties.
For e-mail messages, this can be sender name, e-mail subject and attachment type. Or duration, bit rate and musical genre for audio files. In photos, you can even find information on camera model, f-stop number and exposure time.
This metadata is useful when organizing files by specific criteria or searching for files with certain properties. E.g. images with a resolution higher than 72 dpi, audios shorter than thirty seconds, or e-mail messages containing PDF attachments.
But what metadata is available for a specific file type? How is it labeled? And what kind of information does it contain? HoudahSpot can help you find out.
When you export your photos for viewing in Google Earth or Google Maps, HoudahGeo creates a KML file from one of two templates: “Default” or “Extended Track Info”. The later includes more details and thus produces larger files. This makes the “Default” template the better choice for use with Google Maps.
There are occasions where you may want to customize these templates:
Please note that KML template customization is not an official feature of HoudahGeo 5. It is very much a work in progress and still has rough edges. Moreover, the template system is subject to changes. The intrepid may read on and learn how to create custom templates for KML output in HoudahGeo.
You will need a basic understanding of HTML, XML, the Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language as well as the Mustache template system.
Please let us know if you use custom KML templates. But do understand that we cannot provide support for template customization. Malformed templates may produce unexpected results or cause HoudahGeo or Google Earth to crash.
Continue reading Create Custom KML Templates for Google Earth Export
The default search form in HoudahSpot lets you to search for files by name, text content and content kind.
When you know the type of the file you are looking for, you may want to search by file extension.
Do you frequently search by file extension? Wouldn’t it be convenient if the “File Extension” search was available by default?
Continue reading Find MacOS Files by Extension
