Yep 2 Review – Document/PDF File Manager For Mac OS X

Written by John Thompson on February 27, 2010 · Filed under Review, Software 

Every Mac you buy comes with the iLife suite: iPhoto sorts and organises all of your photos; your songs are taken care of with iTunes but what about your documents? Well, iLife may not have you covered in that department, but what about all those documents you’ve got floating around your hard drive? For that you’re going to need Yep 2…

Not only does Yep keep track of all the PDF and office document files on your hard drive, but it also allows you to scan documents and file them so they’re kept organised and don’t take up room collecting dust in a cupboard. When you start Yep for the first time, it will scan through all your documents on your hard drive and display them in an iPhoto-esque window. The great thing about using Yep is that it doesn’t interfere with any of your file’s paths; it simply indexes them for easy access and you can still get to them without using Yep because you’ll still know where they’re located.

What impressed me above all was the neat, subtle integration with the OS X finder. Yep 2 behaves just like a finder window would when you select a document, allowing you to open it with any program you like, or take a quick look at it through a preview window.

If you select a particular document you’ll see a quick overview of the file information including the filename, size and whatever tags are assigned to it. Although it may be a rather time consuming process to go through all of your documents and tag them for the first time, it’s definitely a great way of keeping everything organised and quickly locating documents when you have a lot on your hard drive.

Users with lots of documents and PDF files will no doubt appreciate how truly fast Yep is when indexing everything the first time you run it. I have close to a thousand PDF’s on my hard drive that have collected over the past few years with various assignments and downloads, and Yep was up and running, ready to go, in no more than a second or two.

Since installing it, there’s no way I can see myself going back to managing all my documents in the OS X Finder, as I’ve become accustomed with finding anything that I need to work on by locating it with tabs I’ve set up or searching for keywords that I know are in the filename.

With so many documents and PDF’s floating around in dozens of directories, Yep has become an indispensable part of my set up over the past month I’ve spent testing and playing around with it. You can purchase Yep 2 from the Ironic Software website, although it packs a rather steep price tag of £28. Whether Yep 2 is worth the price tag will definitely depend on your position, but if you interact with and manage many documents on a daily basis, Yep certainly makes things considerably easier!