Filed under: Software, Video, Cool tools, Productivity
yFlicks: the 'iPhoto for your movies' is 40% off at MacZOT today only
Geeze, those MacZOT guys either have strangely coincidental timing, or I need to consider changing the locks on my house. This is either the second or third time that I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed an app, only to find it go on sale at MacZOT the next day (i.e. - I'm buying a license as I type this). The app in question is yFlicks, which we wrote about back in January (and I probably missed because of all the Macworld craziness). yFlicks is more or less a really cool 'iPhoto for your movies,' allowing you to organize and rate your movie files, as well as update the metadata associated with them. This is a great thing if, like me, you're switching from iPhoto to Aperture, because one drawback of the latter is that it doesn't import or organize movies shot with a digital camera.
But yFlicks does some great stuff I've never seen in a full-on movie organizer before: it offers live video previews when you mouse over the thumbnail (so you don't have to open each movie just to get a look at it), complete support for the Apple Remote, a bookmarklet for downloading movies from popular communities like YouTube, Daily Motion and College Humor, and even a great temporary folder system that doesn't simply copy every movie into your movies folder when playing it, allowing you to pick and chose which movies you actually keep and catalog.
The great thing about yFlicks is that the cleverness doesn't stop there; its developer, Peter Maurer - who Mat Lu pointed out in January has developed a ton of other great Mac apps, has sprinkled all sorts of handy magic throughout yFlicks, from a simple rotate button for movies that were shot with the camera rotated to Smart Folders for organizing your flicks and even one-click access to viewing your movie file in its location in the Finder. In fact, I'm so happy with yFlicks, I'm still buying it straight from Mr. Maurer. If you want to save some cash though, yFlicks is on a 40% sale today at MacZOT: its U.S. price is typically $20, but today-only it's just $11.95. That's a killer deal on one of the best darn movie organizing apps I've ever seen.
Of course, before you decide, you can grab a demo from Many Tricks, Peter Maurer's software company, and take it for a spin before throwing down your cash.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian Allen said 11:18AM on 6-14-2007
But, iPhotos does work with movies.
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sam said 11:39AM on 6-14-2007
brian, re-read the sentence. aperture doesn't work with movies.
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Jason said 11:44AM on 6-14-2007
You beat me to it, sam. ;)
iPhoto is not a great organizer. This will be interesting to try out. Thanks for the post.
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Tony said 12:03PM on 6-14-2007
I'll give the demo a whirl...Although, since switching to Aperture for my photos, I'm still using iPhoto for movies...
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stainboy said 11:57AM on 6-14-2007
no, iPhoto and iTunes does NOT work with movies the way i want. i don't want all my movies in the same folders as my music. i'm glad TUAW highlighted this today...i saw the software on macZOT but the additional plug made me check it out. turns out it's exactly what i'm looking for. cool!
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Mary said 12:02PM on 6-14-2007
What's the filing system for this got over the Finder. I get the feeling I'm missing something here?
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Bill Hartzer said 12:30PM on 6-14-2007
I agree with stainboy...iPhoto and iTunes does NOT work with movies the way i want, too. I wish we had more control over where stuff is saved.
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Trevor said 1:20PM on 6-14-2007
yFlicks looks nice, but I won't buy it because it's missing a big feature: keywords. I want to organize my movies using keywords (the way iPhoto can organize photos using keywords), but that's not possible with yFlicks. However, there's a similar app called iVideo that does support keywords:
http://www.waterfallsw.com/ivideo/
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Bruce said 12:49PM on 6-14-2007
Tried to order but no discount is listed and no discount code was mentioned in your article.
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Dave Chartier said 12:45PM on 6-14-2007
#5: yFlicks adds library management, full screen viewing, auto-downloading from Flash community sites, live previews when mousing over thumbnails... a ton of stuff I already mentioned in the post. It can even rotate movies that were shot, for example, vertically with a digital camera; something I believe you can only do with QuickTime Pro, and even then, not nearly as easily as with yFlicks.
In short: The Finder organizes files. yFlicks organizes movies *and* lets you view, rate, sort, present and do much more.
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TW said 2:03PM on 6-14-2007
Ok, I got the program but how do I import my movies. There is no import function so I'm not sure if I just need to drag my file to the directory with finder or what.
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Dave Chartier said 2:07PM on 6-14-2007
#9: Woops, sorry Brian. I forget to link MacZOT.com sometimes because we talk about it so much. Just head over there to see the daily sale, in which case today's is yFlicks. I've updated the post as well.
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Dave Chartier said 2:10PM on 6-14-2007
#11: You can import them like with most other Mac OS X apps; drag and drop movies on the Dock icon, onto the app window itself. You can even simply drop your entire Movies folder and see it show up in the Temporary Storage section, completely with folder hierarchies.
Don't forget to play around with the preferences under the yFlicks menu; there's a lot of control in there. There's also the 'Integrate with browser...' option that lets you install the bookmarklet for easy downloading of Flash movies from the communities yFlicks supports.
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artifex said 4:49PM on 6-14-2007
Will this still be useful once Coverflow comes to Finder, in Leopard?
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Scott said 11:32PM on 6-14-2007
I partly agree with Trevor (#10): yFlicks isn't very helpful as long as it doesn't have tags or keywords. And its smart groups don't even work on all the fields--only on file name, date entered, and rating. It's more of a glorified video clip player right now, with potential if they'd just add a few more management features.
Where I disagree with Trevor is on using iVideo. While it has every feature I'd want, it's incredibly unstable and buggy, and hasn't been updated in nearly TWO YEARS. I'm not spending any time putting my collection in a product like that, which feels like an orphan to me.
So I'm hoping that the talented people at ManyTricks will add tagging to yFlicks and expand its organizing features.
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Carlos Fonseca said 2:30PM on 6-15-2007
I tryed yFlicks and I found it very anoying since I couldn't add some movies to a folder (not smart)! And hovering a digital camara mpeg movie insted of previewing in the thumb, a frame from the movie apears in the original size behind the thumb... doesn't work for me...
And I must agreed with Scott, iVideo is quite buggy. Adding a new keyword and selecting it makes the app crash! :S
Anyone knows other options?
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Andrew Falconer said 11:12AM on 6-19-2007
I've tried this too and the software is pretty crap to be honest. I thought the instant preview option would be a good one, but you can't set it to play from a set point in the film... this leads to mouse over previews of films becoming a page full of mouse over previews of the paramount and universal logos, which is, quite frankly, useless.
Smart groups cannot be customised in any way, you're stuck with their three default options (name contains, date added and rating).
And the thing that annoys me the most is that it is not able to "monitor" folders, files must be manually added from the finder.
Pretty much the only thing this software adds is thumbnail previews, if you don't care about that then you mayaswell use the finder.
One major feature missing (in the finder) is the option to set a "play count" like in iTunes for video files. In the finder i've got to manually add files to a folder entitled "Not Yet Watched" and then move them into my archive. I was hoping yFlicks would have an option for this but it does not.
I'll maybe check it out again once the feature list has improved, but i'm certainly not paying anything for should-be-freeware.
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