Vista Search comments

Installed Vista Business yesterday (I have an Action Pack
subscription--four times a year a big box of goodies from Microsoft
arrives on my doorstep--Vista Business was in the one that arrived a
couple of days ago). Today I got a chance to play with it a little.

For a long time (since Windows 2000, possibly earlier) if you right
clicked on a file and looked at properties/advanced there was all
kinds of interesting information displayed, but you couldn't _do_
anything with it.

The new Search program in Vista fixes that. Took me a while to figure
it out, but once I did, well, like "wow" man.

As an example, if I want to find every image that I shot with an FZ-7
at 72mm and ISO 200 in May, it's almost trivially easy to do.

Since the process isn't obvious until you've done it once, I'm going
to run through an example for anybody else who might want to try it
out. For the exercise I'm going to find all images taken in May,
June, or July of 2007 with the FZ-7 at 72mm and ISO-200.

First thing, you need your photos copied onto your disk of course (or
your network server, but that slows things down). That's the _only_
thing you need to do to them.

If you just copied them you need to wait for Vista to finish indexing
them. To find out if that has happened go to Start/Control
Panel/System and Maintenance/Indexing Options and you should see near
the middle in the upper third of the window "Indexing Complete". If
you don't see that then wait a while longer. How long it takes
depends on how many files you copied and how fast your machine is.

Once you've copied the files and Vista has indexed them, you're ready
to search.

Click the Start button, then Search. You get a window that says "To
begin, type in the search box". Ignore that.

Click "Advanced Search" instead. Leave the location on "indexed
locations". On the "any" button next to "date" change "any" to "is
before" and leave the date the current date or put it a day in the
future if you have files dated today that you want to search. You'll
get a zillion hits.

Now, to start narrowing it down, above the list of files there's a
group of column headings, "Name, Date Modified, Type, Folder, Authors"
etc.

Hold the mouse pointer on any of those headers and you'll see it
change color and an arrowhead pointing down will appear on the right
end.

Hover the mouse over "Date modified" and click the arrow. You'll see
a little calendar appear, with the month at the top. Click the month
and you get a list of months with the year at the top. Click the
arrow pointing left to go from 2007 to 2006. Click May. At the top
of the calendar click it again and hold the shift while you click
July. Now you'll have a list of all images modified between May and
July.

Now right click anywhere in the column headers and then click "more"
in the box that pops up. You'll get a long list of "details". Scroll
down that list and you'll find a number related to photography. For
this exercise I'm clicking "camera model", "focal length", and "ISO
speed".

Once that is done there are three more column headings. Hovering the
mouse over Camera Model and clicking the arrow I get Canon EOS-30D,
DMC-FZ7, E990, and "Unspecified". I click DMC-FZ7 now I see only
images taken with that model. Then I do the same with focal length,
picking 72mm off the list, then ISO Speed, picking ISO-200 and it's
done.

You can also give images titles (different from the file name), tags,
and comments all of which are searchable in this fashion.

Searches can be saved and reused later and there's a language for
keying them into the search box instead of having to go through the
GUI (however is is quite poorly documented or else doesn't work very
well, I haven't figure out which yet).

By the way, for those shouting doom and gloom about Vista hardware
requirements, the machine I installed it on is three years old and
while it was a pretty well loaded machine then it's no great shakes
now--nonetheless Vista so far is running as well as XP does on the
same hardware, even with all the eye candy including transparency
turned on.

I wouldn't rush right out and buy Vista just for the search capability
but if you have Vista either that came with a machine or as a free
upgrade on a machine that you got for Christmas, the search is
_vastly_ improved over anything that has been in Windows before.

Interesting. Thanks!

J. Clarke wrote:

Installed Vista Business yesterday (I have an Action Pack
subscription--four times a year a big box of goodies from Microsoft
arrives on my doorstep--Vista Business was in the one that arrived a
couple of days ago). Today I got a chance to play with it a little.

For a long time (since Windows 2000, possibly earlier) if you right
clicked on a file and looked at properties/advanced there was all
kinds of interesting information displayed, but you couldn't _do_
anything with it.

The new Search program in Vista fixes that. Took me a while to figure
it out, but once I did, well, like "wow" man.

As an example, if I want to find every image that I shot with an FZ-7
at 72mm and ISO 200 in May, it's almost trivially easy to do.

So they copied a 5 year old feature of KDE?

Sounds quite like the Linux 'beagle' app which has been around for some
time now.

In article , ray
wrote:

Sounds quite like the Linux 'beagle' app which has been around for some
time now.


Yeah, or Mac OSX "Find" and/or Spotlight. Or even Mac OS 9's iondexing
feature (I forget now what it was called).

'Course, M$ crows about any technolgy that they belatedly copy as if it
was theirs. :^)

--
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence.
-- Charles A. Beard

An improved search engine is but one part of an OS and hardly the most
important.
Can you use any of your printers, scanners or monitor calibration devices
with Vista? I cannot and the manufacturers of these late model devices
(Epson and X-rite) will not give any specific answer about when or if they
will offer Vista support. Epson has already said they will not issue a
driver for a scanner that is one generation old and recommended Vuescan
instead. There is no Vista driver for a high end printer from Epson, the
R1800, and Epson will not give a date for a driver release.
What use are printer drivers if I cannot calibrate my monitor?
In fact I have run several Vista release candidates and all I can say is
that almost every review you have read of Vista is a total scam. The most
recent issue of MaximumPC has the only nearly truthful comments I have seen.
The OS is stopwatch timer slower than XP for common operations (this on a
high end dual core machine with 2 gbs of ram) and driver support is scarce
with no promises of support. XP was in much better shape at the time of its
initial release.
Microsoft, until Vista, was always a far more consumer oriented company than
Apple, which has arbitrarily abandoned users by changing to incompatible
OSes and processors several times, and has previously worked hard at
reasonable legacy support. Presumably Microsoft is adapting the Apple model
as Apple has survived, thanks be to Ipod, despite abusing and abandoning its
user base.

On Fri, 2 Feb 2007 15:21:46 -0800, "gowanoh"
wrote:

An improved search engine is but one part of an OS and hardly the most
important.
Can you use any of your printers, scanners or monitor calibration devices
with Vista? I cannot and the manufacturers of these late model devices
(Epson and X-rite) will not give any specific answer about when or if they
will offer Vista support. Epson has already said they will not issue a
driver for a scanner that is one generation old and recommended Vuescan
instead. There is no Vista driver for a high end printer from Epson, the
R1800, and Epson will not give a date for a driver release.
What use are printer drivers if I cannot calibrate my monitor?
In fact I have run several Vista release candidates and all I can say is
that almost every review you have read of Vista is a total scam. The most
recent issue of MaximumPC has the only nearly truthful comments I have seen.
The OS is stopwatch timer slower than XP for common operations (this on a
high end dual core machine with 2 gbs of ram) and driver support is scarce
with no promises of support. XP was in much better shape at the time of its
initial release.
Microsoft, until Vista, was always a far more consumer oriented company than
Apple, which has arbitrarily abandoned users by changing to incompatible
OSes and processors several times, and has previously worked hard at
reasonable legacy support. Presumably Microsoft is adapting the Apple model
as Apple has survived, thanks be to Ipod, despite abusing and abandoning its
user base.

If Vista doesn't do what you need to do then don't use it. Geez. I
don't really give a damn one way or the other.

But it looks to me like your problem is with Epson and whoever made
your scanner and whoever made your monitor calibration device. It's
not like Vista was sprung on them as a surprise.

XP lets you search the files meta-data. I do it all the time to sort MP3
files.

ljc


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
Installed Vista Business yesterday (I have an Action Pack
subscription--four times a year a big box of goodies from Microsoft
arrives on my doorstep--Vista Business was in the one that arrived a
couple of days ago). Today I got a chance to play with it a little.

For a long time (since Windows 2000, possibly earlier) if you right
clicked on a file and looked at properties/advanced there was all
kinds of interesting information displayed, but you couldn't _do_
anything with it.

The new Search program in Vista fixes that. Took me a while to figure
it out, but once I did, well, like "wow" man.

As an example, if I want to find every image that I shot with an FZ-7
at 72mm and ISO 200 in May, it's almost trivially easy to do.

Since the process isn't obvious until you've done it once, I'm going
to run through an example for anybody else who might want to try it
out. For the exercise I'm going to find all images taken in May,
June, or July of 2007 with the FZ-7 at 72mm and ISO-200.

First thing, you need your photos copied onto your disk of course (or
your network server, but that slows things down). That's the _only_
thing you need to do to them.

If you just copied them you need to wait for Vista to finish indexing
them. To find out if that has happened go to Start/Control
Panel/System and Maintenance/Indexing Options and you should see near
the middle in the upper third of the window "Indexing Complete". If
you don't see that then wait a while longer. How long it takes
depends on how many files you copied and how fast your machine is.

Once you've copied the files and Vista has indexed them, you're ready
to search.

Click the Start button, then Search. You get a window that says "To
begin, type in the search box". Ignore that.

Click "Advanced Search" instead. Leave the location on "indexed
locations". On the "any" button next to "date" change "any" to "is
before" and leave the date the current date or put it a day in the
future if you have files dated today that you want to search. You'll
get a zillion hits.

Now, to start narrowing it down, above the list of files there's a
group of column headings, "Name, Date Modified, Type, Folder, Authors"
etc.

Hold the mouse pointer on any of those headers and you'll see it
change color and an arrowhead pointing down will appear on the right
end.

Hover the mouse over "Date modified" and click the arrow. You'll see
a little calendar appear, with the month at the top. Click the month
and you get a list of months with the year at the top. Click the
arrow pointing left to go from 2007 to 2006. Click May. At the top
of the calendar click it again and hold the shift while you click
July. Now you'll have a list of all images modified between May and
July.

Now right click anywhere in the column headers and then click "more"
in the box that pops up. You'll get a long list of "details". Scroll
down that list and you'll find a number related to photography. For
this exercise I'm clicking "camera model", "focal length", and "ISO
speed".

Once that is done there are three more column headings. Hovering the
mouse over Camera Model and clicking the arrow I get Canon EOS-30D,
DMC-FZ7, E990, and "Unspecified". I click DMC-FZ7 now I see only
images taken with that model. Then I do the same with focal length,
picking 72mm off the list, then ISO Speed, picking ISO-200 and it's
done.

You can also give images titles (different from the file name), tags,
and comments all of which are searchable in this fashion.

Searches can be saved and reused later and there's a language for
keying them into the search box instead of having to go through the
GUI (however is is quite poorly documented or else doesn't work very
well, I haven't figure out which yet).

By the way, for those shouting doom and gloom about Vista hardware
requirements, the machine I installed it on is three years old and
while it was a pretty well loaded machine then it's no great shakes
now--nonetheless Vista so far is running as well as XP does on the
same hardware, even with all the eye candy including transparency
turned on.

I wouldn't rush right out and buy Vista just for the search capability
but if you have Vista either that came with a machine or as a free
upgrade on a machine that you got for Christmas, the search is
_vastly_ improved over anything that has been in Windows before.

Of course they will support Vista. Don't be a moron. If they don't then you
choose a poor company to do business with.

ljc


"gowanoh" wrote in message
. ..
An improved search engine is but one part of an OS and hardly the most
important.
Can you use any of your printers, scanners or monitor calibration devices
with Vista? I cannot and the manufacturers of these late model devices
(Epson and X-rite) will not give any specific answer about when or if they
will offer Vista support. Epson has already said they will not issue a
driver for a scanner that is one generation old and recommended Vuescan
instead. There is no Vista driver for a high end printer from Epson, the
R1800, and Epson will not give a date for a driver release.
What use are printer drivers if I cannot calibrate my monitor?
In fact I have run several Vista release candidates and all I can say is
that almost every review you have read of Vista is a total scam. The most
recent issue of MaximumPC has the only nearly truthful comments I have
seen. The OS is stopwatch timer slower than XP for common operations (this
on a high end dual core machine with 2 gbs of ram) and driver support is
scarce with no promises of support. XP was in much better shape at the
time of its initial release.
Microsoft, until Vista, was always a far more consumer oriented company
than Apple, which has arbitrarily abandoned users by changing to
incompatible OSes and processors several times, and has previously worked
hard at reasonable legacy support. Presumably Microsoft is adapting the
Apple model as Apple has survived, thanks be to Ipod, despite abusing and
abandoning its user base.

Little Juice Coupe wrote:
XP lets you search the files meta-data. I do it all the time to sort MP3
files.

Does it allow you to freakin' trim your posts??

--
lsmft