I will never understand this (CLOSED)

Today's free app
https://www.renderhub.com/raph4/dazpackager
Makes your content files ready for DAZ Install Manager.
So great, so far.
Quote:
"Ever bought a Daz Studio product outside the official store and had to manually dig through folders instead of just using Install Manager? DazPackager fixes that."
This is the part, I do not understand. 
What is supposed to be so difficult, installing DAZ content into DAZ files without DIM?
Unzipping is even more simple, than DIM. Click on your zip file, it opens with your zip app, select your target dirctory, done.
No DIM, no other app needed.
Basic stuff.

Well, it is not hard, but some people may want super convenience ^^

I've come to prefer manual installation, since it lets me easily choose whether to install the project in my main library... or in one of my test libraries.

However, it's worth noting that installing via DIM offers a huge advantage over manual installation:
Products you don't like can be quickly removed via DIM (which is a bit more of a hassle with manually installed products).

I unzip, select all, and move to my Daz folder. Takes maybe 10 seconds.

I’m a manual guy myself.  My library is highly customized to fit themes I work in. Plus it can cut down on bloat folders that you don’t need. Though scripts kinda need to follow the author’s installation.

I make all my products DIM and Smart Content compatible. Installing isn't the hard part, it's uninstalling. You'd have to know exactly what files were included and where to look to get rid of everything. With DIM, you hit uninstall and it's gone. I haven't used that particular program but if it also corrects folder structure then that's another benefit because there are still many product authors that do not package correctly. 

Try explaining to someone why nested content directories are bad, and then how to remove them and install that content correctly.

That is what DIM removes, it makes installing easier for everyone, so making your content DIM compatable makes life easier for those who aren't quite as bright as you.

Use any automated install & it fires the content anywhere at the whim of a vendor, most of whom can't be trusted to do anything the same way twice. :0/
At the very least I would check & edit the file hierarchy to match my library layout.

I install almost all my 3rd-party content using Content Wizard so I can add Smart Content metadata 

zip files are simple already.  

DIM is a good Download Manager, that's all I ever use it for.

I had a really hard time understanding how to install zip files until Foxy3D showed me a way  to do it.

And I can't thank Foxy enough for that.

But when I got this new computer, I decided I wanted to put everything together instead of having a special folder for 3rd Party Content.

While trying to figure this out, I was looking through all my saved files (on an external hard drive) and came upon one with simple, direct 
instructions.

C> users> public> public documents> My Daz 3D Library

And I've been using that ever since. That's all I needed all along.

The problem is not installing... Installing is pathetically easy -- you just open the zip file and drop the files in your library. The problem is uninstalling... If it's some easy stuff like a morph or some poses -- all in one folder --, it's easy, but, for other things like characters, environments, clothing, etc., it's a mess... For characters and character-related things, three folders at least -- data, People, Runtime::Textures --, for environments, it's even more confusing because you never know if the PA will spread things into scenes, environments, architecture, props, etc... So, if you want to uninstall something, good luck rummaging inside your folders to find what you have to delete...

Using a dynamic library is great for sorting your photos, but really bad for installing packages of this nature. If the library is corrupted, you're pretty much borked. If you need to find a certain file that has issues, you're going to waste a lot of time searching for it. And you're going to have a ton of duplicate files scattered everywhere. The DIM is a band-aid over the problem of having a specific file/folder structure to get all the content to work properly in Studio. Studio was designed in the same way as Poser was.

Also, back in the days I used a program to "auto-install" old "official" DAZ installers, all it did was insert the path you pre-set, and auto-clicked the check boxes and buttons.

DAZ/Poser users seem to be the only group in the 3D community who can't be bothered with installing any assets manually. And I have made that argument for decades now. Check out 3D professionals who use other software, they sort their assets manually. Why? Because they need to access files without taking hours of their time. So in that sense, the typical Studio/Poser user is mainly a consumer of content. And when or if they need to step out of that consumer base, they find a tangled mess of assets that most just don't want to deal with. The way Studio/Poser processes their assets really sucks, but it provides a "one-click" walkaway solution of sorts. If it works.

I like to make everything manually, as I sometimes modify files in order to avoid conflicts between G8 morphs that don't work on G8.1 characters.
I have a huge library of manual log files to know, what I have done.

Mad Librarian, our catalogue app for DAZ Studio, now handles both halves of this: installing zips by hand and uninstalling them again.

* Drop your zips on its window. Before anything is copied, it shows for each zip how many files are new, how many you already have, how many are another version, and which files its presets need that you don't have.
* You choose the library it goes into: your main one, a test library, or a separate one for third-party content.
* It finds the data, People and Runtime folders however the vendor packed them, "My Library" wrappers and zips inside zips included, and repairs texture paths that point to the wrong folder.

* Uninstalling is a right-click: every zip it installed is listed under Installed from zips. Only files still exactly as installed are removed, to the Recycle Bin. Anything you edited or another product uses stays.
* Installed something by hand years ago? Drop the original zip and choose Uninstall.
* Everything shows up in its catalogue with categories, even products with no Smart Content metadata.

https://www.renderhub.com/affectionx/mad-librarian

Oddly, my experience is quite different. DIM doesn't always look clean, if you look at the folder structure after it installs everything to your library directory. Sometimes I've found a Contents inside the library, for no reason, or random files. Or things that should be somewhere, but I've got to figure out where. This is the problem when you have to reinstall a few TB of DS over again for some reason.

And for individual vendor's files, they all have their own conventions, their own naming for their main library. Sometimes it's Contents, others My Library, others My Daz3D Library. So drag and drop is not going to work every time, is it? Unless you go down a level and take the subdirectories and put them where they go. But that's why I unzip into a separate directory and then copy over to my (separate) Library for 3rd party assets.