Suppose you are faced with a slow server (e.g. someone’s iDisk, a WebDAV volume, some file server accessed through a slow data link, a desktop-mounted FTP server,…) and you need to fetch a multitude of files scattered around on that server.
Each time you copy a few files over, you’re waiting for the copy to finish before you can reasonably go to find the next few files you need; during the copy the server is too sluggish for any further browsing.
Sound familiar? Enter AliasHerder.
Step 1: Create a folder on your desktop; you might want to call it ‘Shopping Basket’ or something similar.
Step 2: Browse the server and find some of the files you need.
Drag their icons from the slow server into the ‘shopping basket’ folder.
IMPORTANT: Before releasing the mouse button, start pressing the Command-Optionkeys. Keep pressing these two keys until just after you have released the mouse button.
This causes the Finder to create aliases of the dropped files instead of copying them – so this all goes quite quickly; there is almost no waiting.
Continue browsing around and getting aliases to those files into your ‘shopping basket’ folder.
Step 3: Drag the icon of the ‘shopping basket’ folder onto the AliasHerder application icon.
Now AliasHerder can copy all those files in one single, unattended operation – go have a few coffees.