The Big Mean Folder Machine 2.0b1

The Big Mean Folder Machine 2.0b1 is a unique and extremely useful utility for everyone. It can actually bring structure to your file collections.

This software is designed for working with large file collections, including digital photographers, content creation, post-production or other creative professionals, system administrators, ...

The Big Mean Folder Machine's database-backed 64-bit processing engine takes care of all the complications that make doing this manually a nightmare. It reads shooting date information from digital photo files (JPEG/Exif and all RAW camera formats supported by Mac OS X), track information from MP3/AAC music files, file creation/ modification dates and file sizes. It takes care of file name conflicts and eliminates manual errors.

Before doing anything at all, it allows you to preview the results to make sure that everything is just perfect. By default, "The Big Mean Folder Machine" always makes copies of your original files rather than moving them, but you can of course also tell it to move existing files to save space and time. Once you have found your own bespoke file organization, you can save your settings into a separate "droplet" application and re-apply the changes quickly.

Major Features:

1. Creating Multi-Level Folder Hierarchies
   • New hierarchy can be up to 3 levels deep.
   • Digital photo shooting dates can be read in a variety of formats (criteria include file name, file type, creation date, modification date, etc.
   • Custom criteria creation, includes template based date formats, file name text extraction.
   • Depth of hierarchy can be controlled by specifying the maximum number of files or the maximum size per folder; deeper levels will be created once the limit has been reached.
   • New folders can be uppercase, lowercase or sentence case.
   • Typical Tasks
   • split photo collection by Year/ Month/ Day.
   • split music collection by Artist / Album / Song
   • split music collections by Year/ Artist
2. Creating Batch Folders
   • Splitting criteria include: number of files per batch folder, total size of batch folder in Kb, Mb, Gb
   • Specify physical or logical file sizes
   • Sort files into batch folders alphabetically, by size, by creation date, by modification date, by digital photo shooting date, etc.
   • Typical Tasks
   • • Backing up your photo collection to 4GB DVDs, beginning with the oldest photos (shooting date) and working your way to the most recent ones.
     • Backing up your music files to MP3 CDs sorted by artist and then by album.
3. Merging Multiple Folders
   • Multiple source folders and folder hierarchies.
   • File name conflict resolution.
   • Typical Tasks - merging all songs from an artist that are currently spread throughout a larger hierarchy into a single folder

Enhancements: First public beta of the new 2.0 version

• New re-sizable assistant window interface
• Faster are more sophisticated file name conflict resolution with advanced sorting
• Improved performance
• New droplet implementation
• New auto-update feature courtesy of Andy Matuschak's Sparkle framework

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard