Desktop organizer

Desktop organizer software applications are applications that automatically create useful organizational structures from desktop content, including heterogeneous types of content including email, files, contacts, companies, RSS news feeds, photos, music and chat sessions. The organization is based on a combination of automated scanning of metadata similar to data mining and manual tagging of content. The metadata stored in applications is correlated based on a structure for the data type handled by the organizer tool. For example, the email address of a sender of an email allows the email to be filed in a virtual folder for the author and company the author works for or a music file is filed by the musician and album label. The resulting visualization simplifies use of desktop content to navigate, search, and use related information stored on the desktop computer. The data in desktop organizer tools is normally stored in a database rather than the computer's file system in order to produce virtual folders where the same item can appear in multiple folders to the user based on its relationship to the folder.

Desktop organizers are related to desktop search because both sets of tools allow users to locate desktop resources. The primary differences between the two are that desktop organizers perform post-search functionality related to the primary purpose of the organizer, offer manual taxonomy creation and tagging by the desktop user, and help gather additional related resources for taxonomy or related content from Internet resources.

Organization tools of contacts and correspondences involve the tracking and management of information stored in multiple communications tools. Due to the rise of computers for use in communications including email, VoIP applications like Skype, chat, web browsers, blogs, RSS and CRM content relating to companies and contacts is often spread across multiple applications. Desktop communications organizers collect and correlate information stored in these applications.

Common features of communications organizers include:

Also referred to as image viewers, picture organizers provide utilities to file and view pictures in folders and to tag pictures with metadata for future use. Picture organizers may also integrate with photo sharing sites that also organize pictures but through a social network.

There are two classes of picture organizers:

Presently, many commercial image organization software offer both automatic and manual picture organization features. A comparison of image viewers reveals that many freely available software packages are available that offer most of the organization features available in commercial software. However, not all image viewers offer organizational tools. Popular picture organizers include Google's Google Photos, DigiKam, Adobe Systems's Elements, Apple's Photos, Phase One's Media Pro 1 and Novell's F-spot.

Common key organizational tools provided by picture organizers are: