We’re usually sceptical of media managers. They always promise big benefits, but often require a lot of setup time before they deliver, if you ever see them at all.

Saleen Video Manager is a little different. Yes, you can spend an age entering library data, if you like – but it also gives you plenty of movie manager tools you can use right away.

Setup begins much like similar tools: point the program at folders containing your movie files, and it imports them into a common library.

This brings immediate benefits as you can search it, sort the files by name, length and more, or use simple sliders to filter them by date, making it easier to find the videos you need.

But the big plus here is that the program also extracts video thumbnails as it imports each movie. This might take a while – especially if you’re accessing terabytes of data on a network share over a wifi connection – but the process is automatic, so you can just leave it to work.

The program displays a timeline for every video, and double-clicking a frame plays it from that point

Once that’s done, clicking any video in the library displays those frames on a timeline. Not only does that make it easier to find a particular movie, but double-clicking any of those frames starts playing the file at that point – a real time-saver.

Organising your collection is simple. Multiselect some files (or search by file name and press Ctrl+A to select all), and right-clicking gives you options to send them to a new collection (a separate set of videos) or a new playlist. Even as a new user you’ll have it figured out in seconds.

Right-clicking gets you a few file management tools, as well – Rename, Delete, “Open in Explorer”. Strictly basics-only, but enough to get by.

And if you want to spend time building up your library, you can do that, too. Each file can be rated, tagged, given a title, description, actor details, URLs and more, and you can then search on the tags as well as the file name.

There are some issues. You may have to install extra components before the player and video extractor will work (VLC, or K-Lite Codec Pack), and the interface needs a little work.

Still, Saleen Video Manager’s thumbnail-based browser is handy, and – assuming you’ve nothing similar already – probably justifies the download all on its own. Take a look.

Saleen Video Manager is a free-for-non-commercial-use application for Windows 7 and later.