dFile Manager

dFile Manager is a useful tool to organize your filesystems and find all duplicate files and folder to save space and have an effective and fast backup.

dFile Manager also embed some useful tools to manage your photo.

With dFile Manager you can:

• Browse your files and folders and easily find duplicates
• Delete, copy and paste files and folder
• Extract metadata from image files
• Resolve gelocation data from image files
• Find duplicates by generic file or by image

dFile Manager create a local, browsable image of the indexed filesystems (aka dFile Manager database) to speed up search.

The logic implemented to find duplicates files is based on a file hashing with MD5 algoritm. When the file is indexed and added to the dFile Manager database, the hash is extracted and saved.

2.    Installation

dFile Manager is JavaFX application engineered, developed and tested and on Widows systems. Further release will support MacOS and Linux.

Main prerequisite to run dFile Manager is the JRE 1.8 (or higher) installed and configured.

After verified this prerequisite, you can download the application at http://digio.cloud/dfm  and start the installer.

3.    Quick start

After installation successfully completed, just run the application and, if JavaFX is correctly installed, the dFile Manager main screen will popup.

 

Main window components are:

• The menu bar
• The navigation button bar at the top left side of the window, just below the menu bar
• The action button bar at the left side of the window
• The main navigation pane, at the left of the window
• The duplicates navigation pane, at the right of the window
• The status bar at the bottom of the window

To start using the application, the very first action is to add a new folder or filesystem to dFile Manager database..

Just click the Add button  on the action button bar and choose the folder to be indexed.

The folder will be scanned, indexed and added to dFile Manager database. You can now browse in the main navigation pane the indexed folder, all its subfolders and all the files within.

 

The number of copies of each file is computed within the files currently indexed in dFile Manager database. In other words if a duplicate of the file is in a folder not indexed in dFile Manager, it will not be detected. Of course, if you index the entire filesystem, all the file duplicates will be detected. Moreover, as dFile Manager leverage its internal database, whenever a change occurs on the filestytem, a rescan operation is required to reflect changes in the dFile Manager database.

 

 

4.    The main navigation pane

The main navigation pane is the heart of the application and allows you to navigate within the dFile Manager database and action your files and folders, where:

• folders are displayed in bold black
• single copy files are displayed in plain black
• files with duplicates are displayed in plain red

Context menu is available for each row of the main navigation pane.

 

Simply double click on the selected folder to navigate to this or double click of the file to open it. Whenever your selection change, the duplicates navigation pane will be populated with all the file duplicates found in the dFile Manager database.

To speed up navigation through the database, the information about folder duplicates is not displayed dynamically in the duplicates navigation pane but the user is required to select the appropriate context menu to find duplicate folders.

4.1.        View all files in folder

By default, dFile Manager provides a folder tree based browsing experience, allowing you to navigate through folders and nested subfolders.

To have an holistic view of all the files in the current folder and all its subfolder, check the View - > View all files in folder menu item.

 

As checked, the main navigation pane will show all the file in the current folder and all its subfolder.

 

 

4.2.        Duplicates only

To restrict the view in the main navigation pane only to files with duplicates, check the View - > View all files menu item.

 

The view will skip all the single copy files and show only with the ones with duplicates (more than one copy)

 

 

 

5.    The navigation button bar

The navigation button bar is located on top of the main navigation pane and helps you navigate through the dFile Manager database.

 

 

 

Home	Navigate to the home folder where all the root folder are listed.
Parent folder	Navigate to the parent folder
Current folder	Indicates the current folder
Previous folder	Navigate to previous folder

 

6.    The duplicates navigation pane

The duplicates navigation pane is dynamically populated with all the duplicates found in the dFile Manager database whenever a file with duplicates is selected in the main navigation pane.

 

In the example above, the selected file has a total of 4 copies, 1 in the current folder and 3 in other folders.

In the duplicates navigation pane, to easily identify duplicates in other folders, the duplicate files are displayed in black color if stored in the current folder and in red color if stored in folder other than the current one. This is very helpful to identify and select all the duplicates out of the current folder and remove.

 

 

6.1.        Select all duplicates

The duplicates navigation pane can also be populated through the Duplicates -> Select all duplicates menu item.

 

In the same example presented before, in the current folder we have two files with duplicates (file 3 and file 9); the Duplicates -> Select all duplicates menu item, will populate the duplicates navigation pane with all the duplicates of files stored in the current folder.

 

As in the previous use case, this could be useful to easily identify and cleanup all the duplicates stored elsewhere in the filesystem.

6.2.        Find duplicate folders

The duplicates navigation pane can also be populated through the Find duplicate folders menu item in the main navigation pane context menu.

This function is only available at user request to avoid delay and speed up the navigation.

Simply select a folder in the main navigation pane, click on mouse right button and select Find duplicate folders. If the selected folder has duplicates, these will be listed in the duplicates navigation pane.

 

 

 

The logic implemented to find duplicates folders is based on a folder size comparison. It means that two folders with same size in bytes, same number of files and same number of folders are considered equal.

6.3.        Duplicates by generic file or image

By default, dFile Manager identifies duplicates comparing the file content through MD5 file hashing. It is fully equivalent to a byte to byte comparison and is perfectly fitting for any generic file comparison.

The JPEG file could represent an exception to this, because two JPG files could be exactly the same image but, as they could contain different metadata, they will not be detected as duplicate file.

To address this, dFile Manager could be configured to find duplicates by generic file or by image, through menu in the menu bar:

 

Through activating the flag by image all the image duplicates, regardless of any metadata, will be detected.

7.    Files and folders context menu

When a file or a folder is selected in the main navigation pane or in the duplicates navigation pane, the context menu will popup at right mouse button click.

Open	If a file is selected, the file itself is launched with the associated program. If a folder is selected, the main navigation pane current folder will change. In multiple selection, this action is not available. Same action if double click on file or folder in the main navigation pane.
Show in Explorer	Open the selected file or folder in Windows File Explorer. In multiple selection, this action is not available.
Delete data	Delete data from dFile Manager database but do not remove from filesystem. This function is useful to exclude some previously indexed folders from the navigation and from duplicates detection. The user can anytime perform a rescan.
Remove	Remove selected files or folders from filesystem and delete from dFile Manager database.  You cannot recover the delete files or folders.
Rename	Rename selected file or folder from filesystem.
Properties	Open the Windows File properties dialog for the selected file or folder. In multiple selection, this action is not available.
Copy	Copy the selected files or folders in the Windows clipboard.
Paste	Paste the files or folders in the Windows clipboard in the current folder in the main navigation pane.

 

Find duplicate folders	Search for all the duplicates of the selected folder. See Find duplicate folders
Go to folder	Switch to selected file folder (or selected folder) as current folder in the main navigation pane. This is only available in the duplicates navigation pane.

 

8.    The action button bar

The action button bar is located at the left side of the window and provide operations to maintain the dFile Manager database.

Add folder	Add a new folder to the dFile Manager database. If the folder to add is a subfolder of folder already existing in the dFile Manager database, it will be indexed as a subfolder.  If not, it will be indexed as a root folder (aka a folder with no parent). If the folder already exists in dFile Manager database, only the missing files and folders will be added.
Rescan folder	Fully rescan the current folder and all its subfolders and files. This operation is the equivalent of a Delete data operation (only deletes data without removing form filesystem) followed a Add operation.

 

9.    Image management

dFile Manager provides capabilities to support image management. While scanning filesystem to build its internal database, dFile Manager extract from JPEG images, when available, the camera model and the geolocation information (latitude and longitude).

Through the integration with external geocoding providers (OpenStreetMap and Google Maps Platform), dFile Manager can resolve the GPS coordinates in plain text address to allow the user to implement a location based image catalog.

OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license. Its use is free but is limited to one request per second. Google Maps Platform is a commercial service and requires Google API key for Geocoding API. Follow the instruction on how to get your API key.

 

By default, dFile Manager does not display the image details in the main navigation pane.

Select the View -> View image details menu item to view or hide all the image details (if available).

 

As this is selected, new columns will be added, and all the available details are displayed in the main navigation pane.

 

To speed up indexing, dFile Manager does not resolve geolocation at index time.

You can resolve the geolocation for the image file, selecting Resolve location from the context menu.