DirectoryOpus is becoming one of my newest and favorite tools. Its essentially a windows file explorer on steroids. There's no other Windows, Mac or Linux equivalent that comes close to the number of features it offers. The only problem with directoryOpus is it has a rather steep learning curve, since there's so many settings. Its been already a year since I've used it, and I still find myself going to its forum to ask beginner level questions.
However, I condensed a list to what I consider the best 5 features in directoryOpus. I think anyone can benefit from these set of tools, whether you are a designer, an architect, a webdeveloper, photographer, or business owner, etc.
The toolbar can be docked and floated around. So you can have a quick access listing of your folders right next to your taskbar shortcuts.
One of its best features is the ability to bind a key to quickly rename files and folders. Many softwares exist in the marketplace for this. Such as advanced renamer, or bulk rename utility.
But directoryOpus includes this in its file explorer. Which is really convenient since you don't have to fire up another program, its all right there if you set it up correctly.
This is especially useful if you are going through alot of photos, and need to "tag" sets of photos at a time. You can just highlight it, click a button, prepend the new description, and hit OK. So having 1000 + photos in one folder is not a problem, since you can sort the folder in alphabetical order by how you named it.
So you never have to have a million nested folders and have to struggle finding relevant pictures / photos. With a descriptive prepended file name, you can also run searches for files much easier too.
You can also tag folders with different font colors, so that its much easier to identify. This comes in handy when you do development, sometimes you'll have a really large list of subfolders (20+) and can't quickly find the one you need, because they all look the same.
All you need to do is simply right click a folder > pick a color tag.
One of directory Opus's best features is the preview pane. Its even better than preview features found in programs like Adobe Bridge,XNview, or even dedicated PDF managers like Fujitsu's ScanSnap.
In addition, if you work with .EPS files as a designer, being able to quickly preview what your vector files look like before opening a file saves time. The same is true if you do architecture, previewing autoCAD .DWG files or even 24″x36″ PDFs come in handy.
You need to install this plugin from sage thumbs and x-tracker's PDF with directory Opus.
Moving items around is super simple thanks to being able to open two folder panes at the same time. Its a pretty standard feature in most good file explorers.