Index Your Files

I ended up here on alternativeto.net because I needed to reinstall Index Your Files and figured I'd give my opinion on it.

I've tried way too many search apps, and while some were fun to tinker with, nothing did what I needed:

• Bring up the window from the tray, type in a few letters that might get me at least results that are "warm", and hit enter.

• Have a near instant list of results that I could access with the context menu, or hopefully, some extra options like copy paths.

I found Index Your Files, and it works flawlessly.

I have a bunch of devices & a bunch of network locations and you can't imagine what a motley crew of rights my files & folders have. Linux on my SAN boxes, and Windows/Android on my HMI devices... plus, there is a handful or more of user names on each of my many machines, sometimes the same profile name is a user on this device and an admin on that device...
(I just gave myself a headache.)

I didn't realize other apps would have issues with this.

Index Your files ("IYF") never fails.

Here are the main "killer features" for me:

1. Not only does IYF provide access to the context menu, but also options like copy the full search results (or what you select) to the clipboard, export the list/selection, etc.
   (Yes, full paths are included.)

2. A file previewer is provided that just works. Images, HTML, PDFs, Office docs, Music (plays right in previewer), Unicode, UTF-8, RTF... Also, you can choose binary, hex, various encodings,and even view thumbnails of many at one time.

3. IYF's search is so simple to use, it's almost beautiful.

You know the file has the word "cola" inside.
Enter in the search box:
cola

Okay... now you remember the file you need also mentioned caffeine.
Enter in the search box:
cola caffeine

And you realize one of the higher level folders is named "Programming"
Enter in the search box:
cola caffeine "<"programming">"
(without the quotes-dam#$@% markdown)

Don't be surprised when it finds what you want.
That's what it does.

1 tip:
If you set up indexes by drives, remove $recyclebin, libraries, etc.
You can add a bunch of indexes, so the more you can chunk out images, documents, apps, user profiles, etc, the better of you'll be.
This way, when you search, you can just tick the boxes next to the indexes you think you need to search.

Enjoy!

spam spam bacon spam

[Edited by SpamSpamBaconSpam, November 28]

The only reason to prefer Everything over IYF, is that you do not know IYF:

On Aug. 6th, 2012 Everything has 250 LIKES and Index Your Files has only 3 LIKES.

From my perspective, there are no reasons for this strange relationship, which are in the program properties. I know both programs pretty well, and because of the better features IYF should have clearly more popularity than Everything. I can only assume, that IYF is simple yet very unknown.

IYF has all advantages of Everything (e.g. being available as portable app) and additionally some more.

Advantages of Index Your Files (IYF) over Everything:

• File-name-search AND Content search
• Network search without remote admin-rights
• Preview of found files with the suitable office-app or picture-viewing app
• Special picture search with specific EXIF-data additional to file-name-criteria
• Special mp3-file-search with music-specific-data such as interpret, album or music-style
• Easier search without knowledge of regular expressions also with search-terms in OR relationship,
  e.g. *.txt / *.ini .

The following Flash Demonstration shows the advantages of Index Your Files:

http://www.indexyourfiles.com/iyf.htm

Other than the name implies, this app does NOT index your files (not the files content). Search is only fast for file names - content search takes as long as it needs to read every name-matching file's content.

Discontinued and doesn't work well on windows 10

It is simply the best file indexing software that I have come across - simple and efficient with very low memory consumption.

For file-search on network drives without remote admin-rights you need Index Your Files (IYF)

Everything is the best search engine, but only for local drives, if you have no admin rights on the remote network-computer.
For search on all (remote) network drives Index Your Files is the best free app, which is also portable, extremly quick in finding files, and equal to Everything for local files, However you need no remote admin rights for search with IYF on remote folders. Since I know it, it is the better Everything for me.

With Gaviri Universal Search GUS (formerly Gaviri PocketSeach) you can search in network drives with a portable version only in the professional version.

With Gaviri GUS you have no FREE portable network search!

You find every text in thousands of XLS-files very quickly with IYF, but for PDF-search PDF XChange Viewer is better

For finding files and texts in files also on big company networks I prefer "Index Your Files" portable.
This very excellent and lightweight searching-tool finds every text in Excel- and Word-Dokuments, but it is not very reliable in finding text in great numbers of PDF-files. For this purpose the PDF XChange Viewer is perfect. My monthly reports of banking-accounts I have stored in PDF-files.
It is very easy to find one special payment in 100's of monthly banking-account-reports (PDf) with PDF XChange Viewer.