A Product Library external browser would be nice...

tj_1ca9500b

I have like a bajillion items in my Daz folders right now, including store content and content that I've found elsewhere.

There are 5-6 folder substructures that cover this.  My Library, My Daz 3D Library, Poser (again subdivided between My Library and My Daz 3D Library), Products, and Categories.  Oftentimes, you may find a product in one or two of these places, but said product is not included in Products and Categories for example.  Search is helpful, but it doesn't always show you the product you are looking for, especially if it's 3rd party content.  This leaves you to remember the vendor name, and where it is within the folder structure, which might mean checking your archive of zip packages to see where a 3rd party product placed it's files

Plus all of the icons are pretty tiny in the folder view, and you have to open up sub folders quite often to see everything that is in each folder (if anything) in the pane to the right, which often involves a bunch of scrolling...

This makes me think that an external standalone browsing program that reads your various Daz folders and generates a 'magazine/catalog' style view would be a sweet idea.  Essentially, it'd use the thumbnails to generate JC Penney Catalog style entries, and you'd browse through the pages similar to how you browse through products in the Daz shop to see what you have in your inventory of products.

Said external reader could include various tags/links that identify the product.  So if say a panty is part of an outfit, it would show up with the panty tag, an outfits tag, and also with the product name tag.  This way, you could click on the tags to expand or narrow your search options.  And perhaps add id tags to items for the next time (the program would have a database to track the 'added' tags for a product).

It wouldn't be perfect (especially for 3rd party content), but being able to visually browse conveniently through your own collection of products, when looking for just the right accessory or piece of wardrobe to complete the look you are going for would be awesome!

Alongside this, if you could say right click on a product thumbnail within Daz and quickly add some tags to ID the product yourself, then a product that isn't already flagged under a category would be added to the category list.  This would be much easier than creating a shortcut and then placing that shortcut in the various folders.  That'd be something that the Daz programmers would have to implement, though.  The 'catalog browser' on the other hand, wouldn't require any modification of the Daz software itself, as it's just be scanning the appropriate folders to generate the catalog entries.

Also, this would allow you to quickly double check your inventory of items when you are browsing through product catalogs on the Daz site, etc. to see if you already have something similar.  And once you knew where the product was in your Daz library (this extrernal reader would give you the folder placement details), you could quickly navigate within Daz to get there.  And to browse through your product entries as you are waiting on renders or whatever.

Definitely not something for the faint of heart, but if some talented programming type was looking to design a cool widget to add to the Daz Store, yeah I'd want this!

Zylox

It helps to come up with a system for organizing your content and rearrange it as you install it.

Daywalker Designs

I believe Taozen has some things that would help on this; perhaps he could be convinced to create one that could read multiple stores at the same time to build a more complete listing of owned content, even ot it's not all installed at the same time.

WendyLuvsCatz

does the paid version of P3DO explorer do it?