Multimedia management.

How do you guys manage your multimedia?

I've got a kajillion clips on my hard-drive (snippets of The Daily Show, etc). I sort them into individual folders, but its becoming difficult to find a particular clip or image when they belong to multiple categories: generally means I have to go through all the folders it could be in, until I find the right one.

Just wanna know how you guys do it.

Desktop search

Google [Small] Search Appliance

*shrugs*

Windows Media Player 10 serves my needs.

Admittedly, it doesn't have a very good search function and I've been told it chokes when dealing with gigabytes of data, but it works quite well for managing music, movies, and pictures.

There are dedicated tools to add more advanced data to each of the formats... but I don't have that many.

Desktop Search would work well if you added metadata/etc. MSN/Windows DS allows you far greater control over what you search as well; so for searching specifics, I'd use MSN/Windows Desktop Search.

Huh. I use MPC to play my video, since I can kajole it to play Quicktime and RealMedia clips, which I have a few of. Occasionally I have to open a .ogm file, too. The file extension creeps me out.I use Picasa to keep track of my images and its tagging support is awesome. I wish I had something like that for video and audio.Ahh, WinFS, you sneaky (I need to watch my language), where are you hiding?

iTunes

Everything goes in your Library, then you can create multiple playlists to file things in multiple categories without making duplicates of the item(s).

I just tried importing a WMV into my Library and it didn't even give me an error message.  Just did nothing.  LOL

It very happily just ate an MPEG, though....

iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa, Spotlight, Google Desktop Search, and "locate".

Seperate drives - No partitions. Directories sorted logically. Obviously, most are left out here, just the media...

A: (yeah, right)
B: (yeah, right)
C: 120GB  OS and Installed Software
D: 120GB  Temp / Swap / Rips / Unsorted
E: 120GB  Installers / ISOs & NRGs / Small Apps
F: 120GB  Video (No folders, just files... ahhh!)
G: 120GB  Downloads / Video / Installers / MP3s / Music Videos
H: 120GB  Documents / 3D Models / Porrn / Pics / TV shows
I:  120GB  Video
J:  \\Bravo\C$
K: \\Charlie\C$
L: \\Delta\C$
M: \\Laptop\C$
N: \\Dad\C$
[...]
S: DigiCam and/or Digital-8 VideoCam
T: USB ThumbDrive
U: Virtual CD-ROM
V: Virtual CD-ROM
W: Virtual CD-ROM
X: Virtual CD-ROM
Y: 48x CDRW
Z: 12x DVD+/-RW

H:\Pics is sorted into categories relevant to how I use them, such as: Carputer, Chicks, Comedy, Comedy for Forums, Comics, Computer, Digicam, Family, Military, Other, Screenshots, Temp, Unsorted, Wallpaper.

H:\Pics\Digicam is sorted by year, then by month, then by major event.  For instance, H:\Pics\Digicam\2005\November\OfficeMove\ . Pics not from a major event or trip are left under the month alone.

MP3s, Videos, Software, and Porrn are obviously all sorted into relevant sub-types.  All archives that contain only one useful file (i.e., other than NFOs and TXTs) are dumped into their relevant location without said useless extra files attached.  Sure, it takes a bit more space, but there's a reason I bought all these hard drives.  I like being able to type in a location to the RUN box and have something execute instantly.

"My Computer" and "Drive Management" are very interesting some days...

Slackmaster:
You have way to many monitors and way to much harddrive space... I am so jealous.

Somebody needs to be spending their money on useful things.  You could probably buy a small car for all you spent on those hard drives... 

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:

Somebody needs to be spending their money on useful things.  You could probably buy a small car for all you spent on those hard drives... 

Michael Griffiths wrote:

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:Somebody needs to be spending their money on useful things.  You could probably buy a small car for all you spent on those hard drives...

There are only 7.

If you but them at the right time (i.e. rebates/etc), you can get all that for under $300.

My multimedia files are organized by type (music, video..) then by some other means within that folder. Music is obviously by artist. My videos are a mess though, especially my Channel 9 videos.

I can't wait for WinFS so that I can start tagging everything.

I don't believe in "multimedia management". You type in a query, select best match and execute the media off the network. Who cares where, how etc. Computers are supposed to work these details.

IPTV and media/video on demand has been around for a while.

As for peer based networks, when enough people have high symmetric bandwidth you could create a client that requests the pieces of video in the order the player needs them for video "streaming". Don't see that happening in a long while though.

AOL Desktop Search

That and my Music is stored by thumbnails with the folder image being the album cover...so it's

Music>Artist>Album>CD1 (if Multiple CD's) if not then it's just the tracks.

how I manage my mm-stuff? easily: I delete it after watching! Saves space, doesn't it? If you have media-snippets that you really wanna keep (music, vid, podcasts) there is no better way than to do what every good admin has to: make a backup! burn it on cd/dvd and forget about it. because you will forget about it eventually, why not start now

I've actually used all but about 100GB, and that's on D:.  Now, the impressive part is, most of this system was built over two years ago, including the hard drives (which used to run in RAID).

I stopped using RAID because I had a couple drives quit and thus lost a couple arrays.  It sucks copying back 100 DVD-Rs at 12x (but not as bad as burningthe DVD-Rs   ). I considered RAID 1 only briefly and decided against that when I figured out I'd basically be paying twice as much per GB.