From time to time I have the need to organize the files on my disk. Documents, Mp3s, pictures…all of them get scattered all over the disk after a while. You can prevent this if you’re organized from the start. And sometimes I’m a little lazy on that task. There are several search alternatives to help you find the file you need, but the software I’m showing you today is different. Referencer keeps a library of your documents, allowing you to specify tags to describe them. Later, you can find those documents by selecting the appropriate tags.

Referencer screenshot It’s not automatic though. You need to add those documents to Referencer manually. That’s a drawback, but it pays off if you search for the same documents several times and always forget where they are.
Referencer interface is simple. On the left you have a tag cloud and the tags specific to the selected document. On the right you have a list of documents with thumbnails (you can opt to see text list, but I prefer the thumbnails). Thumbnails work great for PDF files, but unfortunately don’t work that well for doc files for example. Referencer has also good support for BibTeX and LyX, if you happen to use them. For me, I’m happy just to use it as database for documents. It makes searching much simpler by browsing the tags. One of the uses I give it is adding project documents to it and specifying a tag with the project name. This way, I can find all project related documents quite fast, even if the documents are scattered through several directories. Happy indexing.