15 minutes ago, micstatic said:

You seemed to accuse those who have addons to have a “bloated” community folder. 

Good Lord Dave.  "Accuse"  What?  Good Lord!  Let me translate 'bloated' for you to take out clearly what in your mind is a negative connotation:  it means I need to have enough content to make it worth the trouble, period, end of story.  Put another way, if I had exactly ONE addon, do I need 'Addon Linker'?  Of course not.  How about TWO addons?  Nope.  TEN, nope, etc.  I have ZERO use for it because....

• I own maybe eight 3rd party airports, and three 3rd party planes with about 4 liveries each, and a couple of ultra modest utilities I always use.
• I have less than zero need to avoid have MSFS load up those items because it's flatly irrelevant.  Why?  When I start MSFS I go do other things and when I return, I'm at the Welcome screen.   
• I don't ever want to look at a utility to tell it which plane I'm using, where I'm flying, because as I said I have ample pre-flight stuff to do already and have no need to add yet another and again don't care if MSFS loads a few things I'm not using because after all...it loads up EVERYTHING ELSE.
• Finally, anyone can copy their community folder wherever they wish for back up, and I do this a few times a year when something significant changes.

 

noted

I asked this question way back and got a NO, but will ask again. 

The main original reason for using Addon Linker was that people's MSFS drives were running out of space, because at the start we all had 500Gb drives and found we were getting into trouble, therefore you linked to a larger driver and put the addon data there.

If my Community folder is big enough, and it still is a 2TB 980Pro, can AOL just be a front-end organising tool ? 

2 hours ago, Max Kraus said:

can AOL just be a front-end organising tool ? 

You may need to define what you mean by that, but it's just as useful for keeping things organised and for 'housekeeping' such as finding duplicate add-ons or easy disabling of some or all add-ons when troubleshooting regardless of how large your drive(s) may be.

7 hours ago, Noel said:

Good Lord Dave.  "Accuse"  What?  Good Lord!  Let me translate 'bloated' for you to take out clearly what in your mind is a negative connotation:  it means I need to have enough content to make it worth the trouble, period, end of story.  Put another way, if I had exactly ONE addon, do I need 'Addon Linker'?  Of course not.  How about TWO addons?  Nope.  TEN, nope, etc.  I have ZERO use for it because....

May I humbly suggest you are in the wrong thread Noel... The OP asked for a software that would help him to put some order in his addons. Evidently several simmers immediately replied Addon Linker is your answer, and indeed it is, I too won't use MSFS without AL. 

But since you have no problem sorting your few addons, you don't need anything at all for sure and nobody argues with you on this, kindly understand your absence of problem may not be the case of everyone and accept a useful (free) suggestion made to a fellow simmer who needs it.

In short, if you want to clean up and keep track of your addons in your Community folder (OP's request), Addon Linker is the software of reference for MSFS (339'400 downloads), and will add a whooping 44 mb to your hard disk.

10 hours ago, Max Kraus said:

if my Community folder is big enough, and it still is a 2TB 980Pro, can AOL just be a front-end organising tool ?

Absolutely. As a self confessed addons junkie, I am now approaching 1000 addon airports (pay and freeware), and I have everything organised in a regional folder structure which I then use with the Addons Linker. This means I can very easily "activate" individual airports, whole regions (of my own determination) or even whole countries worth of addons with a single click. Ditto with aircraft (couple of hindred there, probably).

I tend to have a selection of areas active in MSFS at any one time, and use the developers' menu tools in the sim to switch airports or aircraft without having to restart the sim.

Something to consider. I note that @bad2000, the author of AOL has recently posted this on Flightsim.to: 

 

"...As you may have noticed, the development of the tool has slowed down a bit since the announce of MSFS2024 (support still going strong though 🙂 ). With MSFS2024 on the horizon, and not knowing if the tool will still be useful or if it will be put to the trashcan (they have probably, hopefully, completely redone the way addons are managed), i didn't really want to spend time developing new features not knowing if the tool has a future or not. So, this version contains mainly little fixes here and there (i didn't keep tracks of all the changes unfortunately so i'm unable to post a full list).

If it's still useful for MSFS2024 i will certainly try to make it better and add new features if possible, and of course it will still, and always, be 100% free. As always thanks to all for your feedback and support !"
 

 

I was seriously thinking about downloading AOL mainly to speed up my loading times but given the work that will be necessary to reorganise everything, I might just hold off until the 2024 sim comes out. I also saw somewhere (FS Reborn Discord I think) that developers should be able to access the 2024 SDK in September in order to make their products compatible in time for the 2024 release. So potentially (and hopefully) @bad2000 will have this all sorted before release. 

Cheers

Terry  

  

31 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

use the developers' menu tools in the sim to switch airports or aircraft without having to restart the sim.

Andy can you explained how this is done? Please! This will be good to use went I forget to activate a airport in AL.

I keep a spreadsheet of add-ons that I keep up to date myself.  Most of what I have is 3rd party airports, and I have a list I can do quick searching/sorting.  It is handy for when I want to try a new flight and don't know where to go.  Doesn't take much time as long as I always keep it updated.  

The only thing I really don't track is repaints, and I try not to go too crazy with those.  

I don't really bother with an add-on linker.  I try to keep my community folder pretty lean.  Mine had gotten massive, so I just deleted everything and started over with just the stuff I use.  There's so much great freeware out there, but I'm never going to have time to use 90% of it.  

1 hour ago, reecemj said:

Andy can you explained how this is done? Please! This will be good to use went I forget to activate a airport in AL.

Maurice, don't have the sim pc switched on at the moment but I'll get back later on this. It's basically a couple of options on the "tools" menu.

BUT .  .  .  you can still only switch to stuff already in the community folder when the sim was started. So if you forgot to activate it in AL you still can't switch to it without restarting the sim.

5 hours ago, reecemj said:

Andy can you explained how this is done? Please! This will be good to use went I forget to activate a airport in AL.

 

3 hours ago, andy1252 said:

.  .  .  you can still only switch to stuff already in the community folder when the sim was started. So if you forgot to activate it in AL you still can't switch to it without restarting the sim.

Also, the MSFS logbook won't be updated with any flights made when Dev Mode is active (not an issue if the logbook is unimportant to you of course).

Addon Linker can manage the Official folder just as easy as it manages Community. But some things under Official are necessary for the sim to even boot up. So you can't just hit the "remove all" icon for stuff in Official. But it certainly beats removing and putting back Official planes etc. by deleting and redownloading them inside MSFS content manager (and MSFS might at some point start putting them all back automatically which takes huge amounts of time). Instead of just clicking things in or out with AL.

For instance I have some of those old 1930's Redwing airports. They can't co-exist with the modern bespoke airports that MSFS provides. So I click out the modern versions (which are in Official) or I click out the old 1930's version (also in Official). Takes only a few seconds because the very few ones which I would ever need to move in or out I have put by themselves in special folders I created called modern and vintage.

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

it certainly beats removing and putting back Official planes etc

Take a look at this ( https://flightsim.to/file/60019/damfool-default-aircraft-management-folder-original-organization-library ) - it works well