I’ve collected quite a number of STL files for 3D printing, and realized I need some better way to catalogue them, because the default Windows explorer is starting to become burdensome. I’m looking for something that:

  • Shows a 3D preview I can rotate around to see the model
  • Allows me to sort into folders
  • Allows tagging with keywords for later searching
  • Snappy search

Maybe Windows already does this and I’m just not seeing it, but I feel like my collection is at the point where I need something dedicated, similar to a photo cataloguing tool (e.g. Google Photos) or a reference manager (e.g. Zotero/Mendeley).

Any good FOSS tool that does something like this? Or a generic “better file explorer”?

  •  mranderson17   ( @mranderson17@infosec.pub ) English
    4•1 year ago

    So Nextcloud has a shockingly good 3d model viewer with a long list of supported formats https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/files_3dmodelviewer . Here’s a quick demo video I made: https://vimeo.com/865805210?share=copy

    Unfortunately Nextcloud is a whole can of worms and not just an application you install on your desktop. But it does to all the things you asked for so, worth mentioning I guess? Tagging, sorting, and search are just features of it’s general file management though, they are not really stl specific in any way.

    Quick list of supported formats from the github page

    3dm 	Rhino 	
3ds 	Autodesk 3D Studio 	
3mf 	3D Manufacturing Format 	
bim 	dotbim 	
brep/brp 	Boundary Representation 	
dae 	Collada 	
fbx 	Filmbox 	
fcstd 	FreeCAD Standard File Format 	
glb 	GL Transmission Format 	binary
gltf 	GL Transmission Format 	separate and embedded
ifc 	International Foundation Class 	no XML or compressed
iges/igs 	Initial Graphics Exchange Specification 	
obj 	Wavefront 	with mtl and textures
off 	Object File Format 	
ply 	Polygon File Format 	
step/stp 	Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data 	
stl 	Stereolithography Standard Tesselation/Triangle Language 	ASCII and Binary
wrl 	Virtual Reality Modeling Language 	superseded by X3D