Hi,
I mostly use Calibre and the built-in Mac Finder. But that only covers some of the ground, some of my needs.
Calibre is good for documenting file info. I can store a short convenient name, full name, authors, tags, more tags, more tags, format info, and one file in each of several formats. I can export files to my Iriver or Kindle. I can track which files I can’t reliably export and why, so that includes whether conversion tools can fix the problem. All very useful.
Calibre isn’t so good at holding multiple copies of the same file and retaining the original. In fact, if I import a new pdf where I already had a pdf, I lose the old pdf. And I need to run disk utility to repair things, which is a major pain.
Calibre isn’t so good at keeping extra unneeded files out of the way, either.
Calibre isn’t so good at distributing files across different disks-- a faster usb-c disk and a slower but bigger usb-a-3.0 disk.
Calibre can’t find by content either.
Finder is good for organizing low-priority files. And keeping them out of the way. Finder is terrible for documenting file info. At one point MacOS was going to implement tags as an alternative to the whole hierarchical organization, but by now, they’ve abandoned tags. I get error code -36 when I try to add tags to files I’ve processed. I miss most files when I search for tags I’ve previously added. I end up needing extra software to add verbal tags to files I’ve processed for the Mac and Kindle and Iriver. And I can’t use verbal tags with certain library software, or spot which files have which tags because file names get truncated. I need some more-visible way to indicate which versions of which files I’ve imported and which I haven’t.
Finder can’t reliably find by content either.
I can use Dupeguru to detect which files I have several extra copies of. So that’s nice.
I can use Mass Rename for verbal tags, but it’s harder than it should be, and it involves fighting sheet animation. I fucking hate sheet animation. It’s worse than Calibre’s blinding cursors.
Anyone know of something that would work better?