Example Libraries

You can use this thread to share ideas for EagleFiler libraries with other users. There are many possible setups of folders (structure and icons) and tags (names, abbreviations, colors, and organization), and so I’m sure there’s a lot we can learn from each other.

I suggest including a screenshot (to see at a glance what a library is about) and optionally a Zip archive (to try it out). To take a screenshot, press Command-Shift-4 and then the Spacebar to select your window. This will save an image file on the desktop. To create a Zip archive, Control-click on the library’s folder in the Finder and choose “Create Archive of ‘<your library>’.” Then you can attach the files to a forum post using the “Additional Options” section of the form.

Michael – since you are EagleFiler’s Grand Wizard, why don’t you give us a few examples of some of your libraries? I am sure you have a few of them :slight_smile: and that we other users can learn something from them. In time, it may even induce some of us to post our own examples…

Andreas

I’ll probably do that eventually. However, at present my libraries are (a) huge and (b) not very interesting because they were created when EagleFiler was very young and didn’t support tags, etc. So many of them are just big collections of related files, with a few folders. I’ve seen much more creative setups in the screenshots that customers have sent me. I do have some libraries with more structure, but they contain personal mail as well as files that I don’t have permission to distribute.

I have a corresponding problem. One of my two libraries is huge; the other is confidential. Still, I should be able to post screen shots from the huge one, and I’ll work on it “sometime.”

Of course as a novice user I don’t feel I’m a good example, but I know from my own frustrations that anything is better than nothing as a sample.

I think that screenshots with explanations might be more useful than the actual libraries – just cut to the chase.

I’m not at my office computer to take a screenshot with, but I’ve started using EF to archive my manufacturing business’s old emails and other communications, assets, and pretty much anything that I don’t necessarily NEED but don’t want to throw away. Turns out that that’s a lot of stuff, and having it all in one place that’s a bit more powerful than the Finder is a great boon.

I’m also keeping a library on my USB thumb drive, which I mostly use to capture webpages I want to look at “sometime later”. I’ve found this to be a bit friendlier than my previous method of quicksilvering the url to the end of a text file.

Please feel free to post screenshots of your libraries, or simply descriptions of them so that people can see how you’re using EagleFiler. I will try to do this myself when I have some time. And don’t worry about being a novice; you probably have more interesting ideas than you know.

I’ll give a quick example of one folder in my library, the “Software” folder.

I own three machines (laptop, work desktop, home desktop) and I love trying out software, so I have a huge Finder folder containing many programs I’ve downloaded. I’m slowly migrating this into EF, using tags to record where a program is installed (tagged by the name of the machine), or where I should install it (tagged by “to_install_foo” for machine foo). The useful thing about this approach is that I can easily look in the Tags collection to see whether there is some program I need to upgrade on the machine I’m on.

I use the following libraries:

  • Filing - Miscellaneous news articles and reference information that I want to save. It’s mostly Web archives with some PDFs.
  • Financial - Receipts, rebates, order confirmations, credit card and bank statements, invoices, tax forms (blank and completed), research for major purchases.
  • Lists - Archives for the tons of mailing lists that I subscribe to. Searching technical mailing list archives is often a better way to answer questions than asking Google. Some lists I read completely. Others I archive if I think they might be useful someday, e.g. a technology that I think I’m going to want to learn.
  • Mentions - Web pages, articles, podcasts, etc. that discuss my software products.
  • Personal - Archive of non-list e-mails, including both sent and received messages.
  • Publications - Electronic publications, mostly PDFs.
  • Spam - All the spam messages I’ve received since early 2002.
  • SpamSieve - Articles and academic papers pertaining to spam filtering and text classification, as well as a collection of interesting spam messages that I’ve annotated.

Note that the libraries are mostly separated this way because this is how I had organized my files in the Finder before EagleFiler existed. At some point, I may combine a few of them, e.g. so that mail, Web archives, and PDFs pertaining to the same topic are grouped together.

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