FOLDER FRENZY - AN APPEAL FROM A FRUSTRATED USER
Voxxa
Posts: 68
I’m one of those who’s installing my content manually. Don’t think that Smart Content is as "smart" as it claims to be. Have also had some peculiar incidents with Install Manager so I’m also quite careful there. When installing manually though, I have a pretty good idea where everything wind up. From time to time, I’m having computer problems and thus forced to reinstall Windows and the whole shebang, DAZ Studio included. It’s a painstaking process. Over the years I’ve gathered lots of stuff from both Renderosity and DAZ3D. Installing all the stuff back can, in fact, take more than a week. When saying this I mean install from the early morning to the evening with only a few breaks.
One thing in particular I’ve noted, is the PA’s love for making folders. As if it was a divine commandment from above ”thou shalt make folders”. This even if it (to me) has no use as a manual install guy. Perhaps apart from making my life harder. As a user, I like to find the stuff I purchased right away. Not having to search for stuff, often spread around the different folder categories. Often the item I’m looking for has the PA’s name. Not the name of the stuff I purchased. Open the folder and finally... there’s the item I purchased. Guess they might have done so as a precaution. Perhaps in case I’ve suffered from a concussion with resulting amnesia, they’ve provided me with a scripted link to their shop. The chances might be that I might have forgotten from whom I’ve bought the stuff. Other PA’s like to be as exclusive as they create a folder of their own. Not people, props or lights et cetera. But their own brand in the middle of all the other folders. I guess their aim is to stand out among the others.
The thing for me is, if I like what a certain PA is creating, I will return for more. As simple as that. Most of the PA’s are satisfied with their initials on the product then the models name. That way I do not have to sit and sort out the folders with PA's name and delete them to be able to find better and faster. This causes (of course) problems in DAZ Studios search engine. Items are left blank with no connection or link to the item in question within Daz Studio. I do wish there were alternatives for those of us who are installing manually.
3Delight more and more is being phased out in favor of iRay. Therefore I find it remarkable that some PA’s have to state the obvious and put a folder marked ”iRay” within the materials folder. Why not put the materials there straight away? Without the need for an ”iRay” folder?!? I can see the functionality if there would’ve been a choice between iRay and 3Delight. Now it’s only annoying...
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Comments
...\People\Genesis 8 Female\Clothing\GuessWho\Beach\TinyBikini\Materials\TinyBikini\Iray\Top\...
Why do you need to install your content again if you are reinstalling the OS and DS?
The content is completely separate from DS, no need to reinstall. Just tell DS where to find it.
Well... to begin with... if there's no OS then there can't be anything else, can it?! The computer is empty on contents after having been reformatted.
You don't have to reformat the drive though, and if possible it's a good ddiea to keep as much as possible off the C: drive - whether on a physically distinct drive or on a partition.
OP I think you're seriously overcomplicating things and by doing so you're just making things more difficult on yourself.
While I agree that the smart contents pane isn't perfect it's also fair to say that it's a whole lot easier to use than mucking around in the content library yourself. Partly because of what you already described above: lack of standards. The thing is though: it is much easier to move things around within the category structure (aka the smart contents pane) than it is to control your physical library contents. And once you customized these things you don't have to worry about Daz Studio somehow overruling your settings either.
Another important aspect here is that you can fully back up your infrastructure, including all the meta data which is used to manage the categories aka smart contents.
But yah, it's definitely not perfect. Just take a look at your "Lost and Found" category and all its sub categories as well... I'm still busy to sort out that mess even though it's mostly functional already. :)
Well Richard, that depends on the problem of the computer, doesn't it?! If I, say like the last time, find myself unable to download anything. Not even upgrades from Adobe and Windows. And when asking my Internet provider what can cause this and getting no plausible explanation. What do I do then?! There are a plethora of reasons behind me reformatting my hard drive. One can be that I purchased a new and faster one. Other stuff are simply hardware related.
I feel your frustration with the unnecessary folders and I scowl at PAs who split their product up across completely different categories - cameras in Presets, Lights somewhere else, Pre-loads in Scenes, props in Props...
It does make life a bit more difficult for those of us who install manually but I suspect we're in the minority. If you install using another method those (self-inflicted) annoyances disappear. I choose not to, so I accept I'm going to be manually shuffling stuff around, deleting pointless folders and recombining asset parts.
The thing is I only ever have to do this once, regardless of whether or not I reinstall the OS (which with Win10/11 is about every six months!) because my Daz data is on a separate partition. Even if you only have one disk, you can partition it so that Windows thinks you have two. Once, done Windows will present you with a C: and a (virtual) D: drive. Formatting the C: partition leaves everything in D: untouched and then it's simply a matter of reconnecting Studio to your existing folder structure in the Content Directory Manager. Takes all of 10 seconds with no tedious reinstalling and folder flailing required.
I think this is why people have been latching on to your insistence that your Daz data disappears every reinstall and the folder issue merely compounds your frustration.
There are a lot of annoying things the way some (not all) products are finally presented but the disturbance can be minimised by more effective management of your disks. As to why all these redundant folders? Who knows? In the meantime Richard gave you good advice - keep as much as possible off the C: drive (even if it's physically on the same disk but in a logical partition) and much of your problem will disappear. The extra folders, sadly, will not!
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To your point about Daz file search - I agree, it's poor but it should find everything. Check you've selected to search files rather than the database. It's too slow for me to be usable anyway, so I installed a third party tool, activated by a shortcut, which indexes my entire Contents folder and presents results as I type. It's called 'Everything', it's free, it works brilliantly. Created by a company called Void Tools if you're interested. As I said, both you and I have chosen to go down a little trodden path but I find the extra flexibility in the file structure worth the inevitable minor increase in hassle.
Thanks TimberWolf for your sympathy there. As of today, I now do have the DAZ-files on a separate SSD-disk. The idea of a separate partition wasn't new to me, but I had totally forgotten about it (thanks for the reminder!). As for now, I'm running 64 bit Windows 11 on a 2TB SSD M2 chip/disk. My DAZ and Rendo-files directory on another 2TB SSD. I do have a third 2TB SSD for splitting up the same files in several disks if necessary. Heard it would make DAS Studio faster. Apart from that, I keep everything I own of 3D-stuff, in one 6TB portable HDD, one 2TB and another 4TB disk for storage uses.
Another annoying thing I've found about DAZ Studio is first that it has to read everything that's in the directory at start up. Secondly, when loading a saved file with certain morphs and files etc, the program reads stuff that aren't included in my project. Why not program DAZ Studio to only look for the files included in my art work and nothing else? By doing so, it would be much faster than it is today.
I would like to share another example when it comes to manual installation. Some PA's split their product into, say three different files. Why, I don't know, because in all it's just about a couple of hundred megs. Could easily fit into one. The dumbest thing I encounter, is that when unzipping the files, I'm constantly asked if I want to replace the ReadMe-file. To my surprise the PA has included three identical Info-files consisting of the same info...??? Now, why do such a stupid and unnecessary thing?!
Some PA's are making add-ons for other PA's products. Say, a new set of pattern and colors for a dress. When opening these add-ons I often see that they haven't included the name of that same dress their product is supporting. Instead I find their ID or artist-name on a folder. If I would drop this with the accompanying Data and Runtime folders into the directory, it wouldn't find the way to the right folder. Instead it would be lying by itself in the clothes folder. Then I'll have to guess where it was supposed to belong. This has happened more times than I can keep a count on. So now, within the zip-file, I've renamed the folder with their artist-name on and renamed it to that of the product it was supposed to add something to. Funny that they (the PA's) themselves haven't thought of it...??
This time around, I've looked over the PA's zip-files and erased the folders with the PA's names on, 3Delight-folders and iRay folders. The latter materials I've put right into the material folder, since there's no need for a folder stating what to me is obvious. Makes sense, as I'm not using 3Delight and never will. Also it saves urgently needed space in my hard drive. So, the next time (which I hope will be far away) I don't have to deal with that but can install everything right away without worries.
+1000 for the comments about the folder structure, vanity folders (PA's name) and orphaned add-on materials. I blaim Poser for the mess, as it reaaly didn't have any sort of functional logic in content management.
The situation has improved in DS though, but there are still some PA's that just don't want to understand.
As for management of storage space and large libraries, there are ways for creating large libraries on several disks without using multiple libraries.
One of those ways is mounting disks to folders on an other disk and an other is to use junctions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/junction
I'll chalk up the 'split directory' stuff to a combo of lack of understading of the flexibility of DS's layout, a crud ton of out dated tutorials, and most definitely, poser hang over, with a side order of not considering user's worflows, and only the pa's workflow.
I do disagree that poser "...didn't have any sort of functional logic in content management.", however. It did have a logic, it just didn't survive users. lol.
IMHO, it makes sense, as Poser is really 'hand holdy' and provides a rather inflexible workflow. At least they finally let users put files in what ever folder they wanted, regardless of extension.
Now if they'd just do something about the UI, gag me that thing is oudated.
Just for informational purposes, including a readme type file or license in EVERY zip file is often a requirement for vendors. We're often literally not allowed NOT to do it. I assume this is so if the files were ever separated you would be able to identify the product and/or its license even if you did not have the other zips. It depends on the brokerage.
As for the multiple zips, some brokerages have zip file size limits. In the past this has been as small as a total of 3 50 MB zips ONLY, for the ENTIRE product, no matter how extensive the product was. I believe it's a lot more nowdays, but we still have limits as to how big our zips can be, even just for uploading. This I assume is because some people do not have fast connections and need to download the files in smaller chunks before they time out. This makes it more available for more people to be able to download their purchases. We also don't package the final installer files here, so a lot of these things are not within the vendor's control. We just do what we're told :)
Thanks for clearifying this as a PA. Still makes no sense to me why you have to pack three identical files in three different folders. You don't pack three props, data and runtime folders in your zip-files, now do you? In case one of the zip-files get lost. Following your logic that would be of necessity, right? Even if this is the case, there's still a lot of confusion as to why there has to be triplets of the info-files. Also as I mention when some PA:s are making add-ons that wind up loosely somewhere. What I'm looking for and aiming at, is more of a logic in the assembly of your products. Say, if I buy an environment file, I would really like all the stuff connected to it to be in one and the same folder. That even goes for the poses and camera and light presets. That with the exception of the data and runtime folders. My english teacher from L.A. had a principle that I would recommend. He called it "The KISS-priciple" = Keep It Simple, Stupid.
I too use only manual install. But I only install the content I need for the current project. Then I backup my project folders and when I switch the project I simply switch the content folder. Easy as that, fast and secure.
Its easy to write this after you've done the work, but maybe for next time.......
I have 29 My library folders, each taking up over 50 gbs of stuff.
From the pehistoric age I have 24 runtime that have Poser content
All of the new stuff is baked up weekly
One version on computer #1 (installed internal drive)
2nd version then transferred to external hard drive
3rd version is baked up from external hard drive to 2nd computer
Why
During the course of 15 years amassing this stuff, have encountered your problem on three separate occasions.
The time you spent installing sounds about right.
If I might respectfully suggest purchasing external drive.
Wd,Crucial,Samsung all make various drives in various price ranges. As of today 3/26/22 many are on sale at Best Buy and Amazon
Not bragging, bit embarassed,have over 15 external collected over years.
They are worth every dime, they would have made your very long week into a very short day.
You would only have had to check the progress bar.
You coud even have saved various versions of Daz.
More years ago than I can remember went through what you did...... never again!
Best of Luck
I agree with you on that. I use a content installer tool that makes me stop every time it has to overwrite the multiple readme files. It gets annoying. But I only have to deal with that from other stores since I use DIM to install Daz products.
When we do our products I usually try to keep things in the same folder if I can. Like on our Guitar Bundle, the poses were a separate product in the 3 part bundle, but I placed them in the props folder with the props, since they were wearable poses made specifically for the 3 guitar props. We did the same for our Christmas set. The only one I didn't do that with was our Egyptian products because they were shaders and poses. The poses were bought by Daz, plus the 2 little props that came with them were things that were hand held, so I put the props right in the poses folder so they would be easy to find.
Thank you, Zai! I do love the products you've made. Especially those with the guitars. Used them on several images with great results. The morphable guitar cords are fantastic!
I learned long ago to keep my addons seperate from the main Daz installs. Otherwise you get the officials mixed up with non official stuff and it's near impossible to seperate them when you have to.
I COMPLETELY agree with your opinion of things being scattered all over. I used to just unzip unzip unzip into my library but I spent about 1 1/2 years, several years ago categorizing everything in the DAZ folders and in my old poser runtimes of over 20 years of content both paid and free from so many sites. I have over 4TB of content dating way back to 1998 or so from here, Rsity, Rotica, and many other sites, many long gone. I finally got frustrated just trying to find stuff and I never used the content manager. So everything is logically, to me, organized very specifically. Some things though don't work in my organized library so I have a second library set up according to the needs of some scripts which won't work without a specific library organization that script requires.
One thing I did was buy hard drives to synch every time I add something new so I never lose my library. I have 1 data center NAS drive for my library, and 2 8TB external drives. One resides in the original box in my closet, one resides in a safe deposit box at the bank. Once a month I synch to my "closet" drive and every 3 months I grab the one at the bank and synch both drives.