Visual maps of your documents and images on Google Desktop

This program brings a fresh new perspective to searching for documents and images. GDS Images and Document Maps is a plug in which is supposed to help you find images and documents more easily. It’s very useful in giving you an overview of information retrieved by the search and in helping you to isolate the group of document that you are looking for. It works by taking the results of a search and visually grouping related documents together so you can quickly identify the group that you are looking for. Document and images are displayed on a map, with related documents or similar pictures nearby.

When looking for images this approach can be convenient since images are indexed based on the name and path, which is usually not enough to determine the image’s content. On the map, E-Mails and Word Documents are displayed as red dots on a blue background, the actual background intensities varies as peaks and valleys. Documents on a valley (dark area of the background) are likely to be more related to your document at the same distance on a peak. On the map images are displayed as thumbnails. You can pan the map with the left mouse button and zoom in with the slider on the left. Once the map displays a document, you can identify on the map all the documents similar to the one selected with a right mouse click.

This is an interesting tool although in reality, I found it took twice as long to find images and documents than usual. I can see that once used to it, it could be helpful but unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time working with it, you’ll probably end up more time trying to figure it out than actually finding your images and documents.

GDS Images and Document Maps is a plug-in which helps you locate images and documents that you are looking for.

The plug in takes the results of a GDS search and visually groups related document together, so you can quickly identify the group that you are looking for.