I'm still waiting for a tag field to be added to the save dialog.

Superdotman

I've been using del.icio.us for... a little over two years, and have 1208 bookmarks, and probably almost as many tags :).

I don't tag anything else. I have some folders, but not "well organized". I don't really see a need for spending a lot of time developing and maintaining some sophisticated file organization scheme. I know how to use the search tools I have available to me. Anything I can't find I probably didn't need, or wasn't really looking for.

Joshua Timberman

I use Punakea for OS X when I remember to. It's basically just for tagging, but unlike, say, Spotlight, it has a tag cloud so you can immediately find the things you use most often. Because it's not really integrated into my workflow, though, I rarely remember. (I've also recently restarted using del.icio.us after discovering the bookmarklets, which make it *so* much easier.)

eleraama

As a grad student, I have a pretty substantial collection of journal articles saved (pdf format) on my computer. Each article is listed in my bibliography software (EndNote) and I assign keywords there for easy searching. If I weren't using EndNote, I would definitely tag the individual pdf, but this method has been working well so far.

BethroTull

Music tags are critical but easy with iTunes...haven't done much research for photos but would like to. Everything else is pretty easy to find and seldom needed.

Jarick

Word has let you meta-tag files since way back in the DOS days. In those days, though, we had Lotus Magellan to build an index of everything so you could search through all your files at the speed of light and pull up exactly what you were looking for, whether it was tagged or not.

I store stuff in logical folders with logical file names, so it's very seldom that I have to go looking for something. But I sure miss Lotus Magellan.

infmom

I have been using Referencer [icculus.org] on Ubuntu Feisty (and now Gutsy) to tag my files. Tags are not portable, but Referencer produces an xml file.

garoux

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to tag all of my photos - including Event, faces found in the photo, and other helpful tags. It is insanely helpful if I am doing a project where I need photos with certain people in it and has help out tremendously.

On the downside - by Default PSE tags photos using it's proprietary database. There is a function called "Write tags to file" but it does not write them by default. So when the db gets whacky (like it just did for me) then your tags are in limbo. When you do write them, it writes them as an IPTC tag which is readable by the likes of Flickr and SmugMug which will automatically tag them when you upload them.

Other than photos, and maybe movies and music, I do not see much sense in tagging other types of files. Typically these other files are searchable by the text that they contain.

ddrager

I've tried a little bit of the tagging photos thing, but generally no on the tagging of files. I don't even use tagging for my bookmarks; I have a del.icio.us account, but I don't use it. I need the structure that's lacking from them. I think the ideal is different for different people and is generally somewhere in between the two.

And as far as people knowing about tags and del.icio.us, within the past couple weeks I led a discussion in class (I'm a graduate student, and most of my work is web related, including the class in question), and almost no one had heard of del.icio.us, and it took a bit of prompting from me before a few of them grokked what was meant by 'tagging' (as they had used the idea in other contexts, but didn't just know it was what I meant).

Also, I've had many experiences where I've been talking to relatively computer-savvy people who give me blank stares when I talk about 'social bookmarking', and give me an even more perplexed look when I ask, "Have you heard of del.icio.us?" Because, no, they haven't.

mayara

Photo tagging is definitely efficient. I'm just trying to figure out the BEST way to do it, and the best software. Photos too often can fit in more than 1 folder grouping.

LessIsMore

@SirSmiley: If you had a robot assistant that could instantly dive into the pile and return with the proper book (i.e. a computer operating system accessing a disk and locating something via the tag you've created) then the size of the pile or the "messiness" of it would be irrelevant. I myself am too old school of a computer user to be comfortable simply dumping all my folder structures to use strictly tags (it took me a -long- time to get used to the folderless structure of GMail.) but still... you could easily, with a robust tag system, forgo using any structure to your file storage what-so-ever outside of the tags themselves.

JFitzpatrick

SIRSMILEY--
Tagging isn't like applying the Dewey decimal system and throwing all of the books on the floor. If you use Spotlight or Google Desktop it's like applying the Dewey decimal system to a library of shelved books and asking your personal assistant to retrieve all of the books on sheep shearing while you are busy with something else.
There is still structure, you just don't have to spend your precious time sloshing around in it.

ajeys

Yes, tagging is may be coming but, it isn't the second coming. Organizing has been a constant issue for humanity since before computers were invented.

The dewey decimal system is a great library tool but, if we just applied the system then threw all of the books on the floor it would be completely useless.

Tagging is another potential tool to help streamline things.

SirSmiley

I have been using metadata to tag information for years now, but mostly manual methods, and tagging only that which I would forget, or which is indistinct by folder/date/filenames.

I would love to tag better my system and user utilities. However, USB does not allow comments. As it is, I mostly use a combination of folders and index files, and well-worn grep tools.

I don't tag photos, but sent FotoTagger to my mom, who is scanning in all the 50-120-year-old photos, with names and whatever other info. Better to have the tag visible than in the comment.

Cornflower

I'm using the free utility UltraFolder to tag the files on my hard drive. It's really easy to use. Drag a file to the UltraFolder icon and a dialog asks you to select existing tags or enter new ones. Also has a nice preview feature to see the file contents without opening it.
[www.ultrafolder.com]

bobmanc

Imagine having to locate a file on the interent using only a folder structure. You'd have folders within folders for days! Because larger hard drive space is becoming cheaper by the minute, we will want everything stored locally. Using a highly complex folder stucture just won't cut it. The move to tagging everything is coming, it's just a matter of when.

oh, THEFIONUT: you can solve your problem by making 2 to 3 alias/shortcuts in different folders and have the file in only one place. Hope that helps for now.

Mykol225

I've been using tag2find for file tagging and it's both efficient and portable between (Windows) systems. I'm primarily using it for mp3s right now, but also have some base tags in place for other files.

pearlandopal

So after reading this site for almost 2 years I've been meaning to check out del.is.cious and just have never gotten around to it.

You wrote: "virtually everyone has a pretty fair idea what tagging is and how to use tags online"

Uh... I know what tagging is, but actually have NO IDEA how it works online or anywhere else. Perhaps one of your "Newbie" features is in order...?

Shamefacedly,

LMB

Lula Mae Broadway

I would really like to tag songs in iTunes, but so far I haven't seen the ability to beyond the standard song tags. It would be useful to be able to use multiple tags per song to describe its usefulness for certain projects, like "vocals jazz blues long-intro" etc. Using something like Qloud is unwieldy, but that's the best I've seen so far.

I've started tagging photos, and would do the same for movies if I saved those. I see usefulness in being able to tag any file, but wouldn't necessarily tag all files.

Cris

Well, I'm a IA and UI designer who thinks there's a fair amount of mileage in this. I answered, 'No, but I've always wanted to!'. This is true to such an extent that I'm at the early stages of whipping up some interest in a project of mine called Meta Desktop. (Forgive the shameless plug!)

It's a replacement for the desktop hierarchy based on enhanced metadata, linguistic control and user-defined 'smartness'. It uses a faceted system and 'tagging'. It's open source too.

Loads more about it at [mprussell.org] if you're interested.

mprussell

I do like to tag documents I've been working on. I'm not always good about doing it....but I do try. For example, if I get sent a document that relates to a particular project but wasn't something I worked on, I will tag that document with a few different keywords. It's better than putting in one folder. I also keep a list of my keywords on my Google sidebar. I tag using "properties" in Windows (no Vista at work yet) and then entering the tags into the "keywords" section. I've found that on my Mac at home I can find the keywords under Properties.

annho

I tag my pictures only, for pretty much all the same reasons jfitzpatrick already stated. Everything else seems like overkill.

theleahsaur

Cross platform is the issue for me as well. I've found that most file types have their own metadata fields so you can tag at the file level. Pictures, pdf's, etc all have it.
I can tag in bulk using something like exiftool

enine

I've been looking to do something like this for ages. Sure I can find every file I have, I keep things organised. But sometimes want things in 2 or 3 places, with only 1 copy. Esp with worksheets and resources I make for school.

Having only XP still, I'm still looking for something that'll work.

TheFionut

I think tagging could be great if there was a cross-platform solution. I agree w/ Monster79 on this. Until something exists that works on multiple OS's I can't justify the time spent tagging my existing files.

But the potential is huge. Just type in a tag keyword into Spotlight or Quicksilver or similar (Launchy w/ a plugin?), get your file in 1-2 seconds and open it. No need to browse thru a complicated file structure.

nsxstorm

Seems very unwieldily for practical use. Tagging's all about like and stumbling upon things. If I want to find a particular file I need more then a general tag. Now you can tag with context specific words but that would be very time consuming and you would still need to store those words for future lookup.

LMBE

I put metadata into the title of the item. If it's authored piece, I start with the author, last name first. Then the title of the document, any periodical information and a date if it's important.

Just like BitTorrent, all the essential information is in the title of the document. I rename everything I download in this scheme.

All of this is arranged in a file structure, so I can search for it with the Windows XP search (which sucks), launch with Launchy, or use Google Desktop search

CanadianCynic

I'm holding off on getting everything tagged because I have tons of photos on flickr and want to be able to sync the tags between the two. There is a project by Erwyn van der Meer for doing that:

[www.codeplex.com]

but I haven't been able to get it to work as of yet.

vsboxerboy

I've started to tag my music in iTunes, but nothing else offline. I'm tagging photos at Flickr.

cv

One thing to add as a side note... if you're going to get started on tagging your photos I'd recommend Picasa2. I use Adobe LightRoom for various purposes when I'm working with commercial photography, but the tagging features of Adobe aren't portable. Picasa actually embeds your tags right into the image file using an international standard.

JFitzpatrick

I use tagging on my photos. I have created some scripts which allow me to use the Xee image viewer and assign image rankings (1,2,3,trash) (these allso add a tag forprocess)
I then use the SpotlightFS running with Macfuse to have smart folders that can I view with my Raw Conversion software. Because the tags are in the Exif data they also get added to flickr when I upload using the FlickrUploadr.

CaptainChickenpants

Two reasons I don't: one, it's really time consuming to tag your (several thousand) existing files. Two, as far as I am aware, tags aren't portable. So if I copy my tagged Mac documents to my PC, the tags are out the Window (pun intended.)

If problem #2 could be remedied, then I just need a del.icio.us-style program to auto-tag existing documents, and I'm sold. Lifehacker, prove me a doofus and solve #1 and #2! :)

monster79

I tag photographs.

I see absolutely no need to tag other files at the moment (if I know I'm looking for an executable installation file, I know what folder it will be in. If I need a grade roster from a class I taught last year. I know where that will be, etc...)

With photographs however there is an extremely practical application for tagging... in that you simply cannot effectively sort photographs by the data they contain using folders. Sure I have them organized cleanly with a folder structure like /photos/year/YYYY-MM-DD Event/filenames.jpeg which makes it easy to say find all the pictures that I took at the apply orchard last year. It doesn't however help me at all if I want to find every picture of my daughter from the last two years and make a time line style animation. Nor does it help me find all the pictures of a neighbors kid who is often in my pictures if his mom or dad wants a dvd burned, nor does it help me pull up every image of my wife during pregnancy to make a morph image. Here is where tagging is incredibly helpful. By spending a bit of time tagging the images as I throw them into my organizational structure I can easily retrieve richer results later.

JFitzpatrick

i sure do, using tagbot by big robot software - i'm curious, though, and worried, that big robot seem to have disappeared mysteriously - their website's no longer working for me, and tagbot fails to find any updates... have they run away into the night?

m_s

You can tag in ubuntu gutsy too. You just need a simple python script and you've got it.
[brib.wordpress.com]

lundy.s

Tagging only works when I it has good batch tagging, autocomplete, and autosuggest.

It also works much better when there's more than one person applying tags (then you get a "most popular tags" folksonomy).

engtech

Tagging is a decent concept, but it just doesn't work that well in practice.
The only thing I use tags for really is del.icio.us (And I would prefer it if that used hierarchal structure instead)

I have a fairly average amount of links in it, but my taglist is a huge list of somewhat redundant tags (Lots that are pretty much the same)
It is nice being able to go to del.icio.us/_dbr/zsh to find that article on the ZSH shell, or _dbr/shell+linux to find articles on all shells I've bookmarked.
But, I could easily organize them in folders, a linux/ folder, inside shells/ and inside the links.

The problem with tags, I find, is it's extremely difficult to keep a managable list of tags. If you tag stuff over time, you end up with a huge range of tags. If you tag the same thing twice, chances are you will end up with a different set of tags..

Same applies to files, if I tag the same download once, then a month later, they will be different. Where as with organizing stuff in files:
If it's a video, it goes in ~/Movies/ (or C:\Video\ when I'm using Windows), and if it's a TV show, it goes in ~/Movies/TV/[show name]/[season number]
If it's a bit of software, it goes in Documents/Downloads/Software/

That said, tagging seems to apply better to photos, but it still really needs to be organized into folders as well. Having 20000 images in a single folder will make it damn-near impossible to find a particular set of photos.
When I transfer the images from my camera, they are nearly always of a single event (A specific gig, someones birthday party, etc etc).
I could tag them all, but it's more intuitive to go to Pictures/Photos/2007_12_24-SomeonesBirthday/
Now, tagging each photo in those folders would make searching easier. And here I suppose I run into the problem everyone else is having - cross-platform-ness.
I could have put the tags in the EXIF data, but I started getting into photography when I was using Windows, manually organizing images using Explorer (Worked perfectly, I had a yyyy_mm_dd - [event name] structure, then for big events like several-week-long-holidays, I made sub-folders for each area, or each day or whatever fit best)

EXIF tags will get transfered, and in retrospect I wish I did start tagging photos with who or what was in it, and the location it was taken. But it's too late now, and besides, I can easily find any photo I want to find by going to the rough date I took them on, finding the event name, and using the thumbnails to find that image..
If I ever started photography as a job, rather than hobby, I would defiantly start tagging images, but for my own photos, the hierarchical organization works perfectly.

For organizing files, the fact the tags can't be stored in the file itself renders them useless really. Folder structure is easily preserved, fundamentally cross-platform, just as easy. Tagging is temperamental, inconsistent and doesn't really solve any problems (Apart when applied to photos).

dbr

I don't have a vast library of photos to tag so I have no frame of reference, but it sounds like the tags themselves are about very specific content, like, [Jack Jill countyfair03 shade fstopX]. The more robust and systematic your tagging system, the more options you get.

The problem with folder hierarchies is that you get your information from one particular angle, and that's it. By project, by context, by task, whatever; there's not a very good way to throw everything into a pile and pull out only what you need on that occasion.

If you have all your telephone bills stashed in /bills/phone/ and the rent check in /apartment/ you couldn't do one quick search to get all your expenses for a given time period; and forget about more interesting angles like bills over $1,000 or only the recurring ones.

But, if you tag the phone bill with [expense recursive phone +1k due15th] and the rent check with [home expense recursive due1st -1k], you have all kinds of options.

Jeff

I mostly tag my scanned documents using [www.42Tags.com.] It has auto-complete, batch tag management features, and all the important scanning features I need. For the rest I have del.icio.us and MS Photo Gallery.

eburcat

Recently I looked into file tagging as an integral part of a simple personal note taking system. The idea was that I would use Windows metadata to organise (text) files containing personal notes. Then, when I later wanted to find a note or notes pertaining to a particular topic, I would search on the metadata. But I found the only method provided by XP to enter the tags, or metadata, was too longwinded, ie, save the file, then right-click on it and select Properties, then add the keywords and save. Also, searching on the tags was only possible natively by using the Windows gui search facility.

It would be great to have a command-line interface to the file metadata in Windows, as well as a gui interface, both for adding/editing tags and searching on them. I remember carrying out some pretty extensive research for a tool that would enable me to do this, but found nothing suitable (if anybody knows of anything worth considering, please shout). My next step would have been to design/develop something myself, but the cost/benefit of this wasn't quite favourable enough for me at the time (my development skills are not much better that at "curiosity" level).

For me, the alternative to tagging would be to organise my notes in a traditional folder hierarchy, with the folders representing broad organisational units and sub-units. This has the advantage that it is more cross-platform friendly than using metadata, but has the disadvantage that, where a file should be organised in more than one folder, you cannot do it - you have to start creating shortcuts to the original file wherever you need them. Adding a similar tag to more than one file would be better.

So, in short, I would like to use tags in Windows XP, if they were more readily accessible.

GreenT

@infmom: I miss magellan too and mostly the light speed; right now the tool that can give you both is the win version of unix locate... fast and effective, searching inside bin files could be difficult tough.
That's why I don't believe in tagging: imagine a locate that can read a Word / Excel file and you are done, tagging is only useful for pictures.

ridleyscott

So I guess Leopard didn't make any significant changes to using metadata?

Fyodor

@CanadianCynic: I am totally onboard with this. Tagging within the title makes tags portable and accessible. All my files are in my preferred order without me having to sort them. Works great for me!

telecommatt

So, I Live in one text file and have written about it here. With that, tagging all of my text-only documents became trivial, and so most of them get tagged when I write them. Others do not, but get updated later when the tag system grows. Generally, any document that I really like or really need, and which is in plain text, will get copied into this One File To Rule Them All.

To facilitate all of this, I have a (so far, primitive) set of analysis programs that I have written that help me search and find things based on the tags. The programs are not great, but they are homebrew and fit my needs rather well.

Obviously, this does not work for pdf files or images. I recently hacked out a little command line app to add some metadata to the photographs that I take, I keep photos organized by year/month/event... and that mostly works. It is not great, but it helps. I do a little similar with PDFs, but I fortunately use PDFs very little.

My email solution is: inbox for each of my identities, disastrously unorganized archive for anything I want to keep. One day... it shall be repaired. Tagged. Properly archived. Or something.

I actually, for real, want to create a database that can easily be synced between my Mac and my Linux server which stores all of the metadata information for all of the files that I track. And, really, even that is not ideal. Tools that let me *easily* store the metadata directly in the file, like exif for JPG images, are the ideal. Metadata editing should always be as easy as pointing at a special location on the screen and clicking.

savanni

To be honest I've never tagged any other files besides my mp3s. I'm a pretty good organizer so my breakdown works likes this:

MP3s: Archive Of Songs\Artist Name\Album\file.mp3/mp4 etc

-Any artist who has more than 3 songs gets their own named folder. There are separate folders for: Jazz, Opera, Classical, Rap and Techno to further make finding genres or artists easy.

-Complete discographies or ongoing ones are numbered in the following format: 01 - Album Name (Year)
Within these folders there may be subfolders for studio albums, Live, Acoustic or special releases of albums.

As for my photos I use to use a Year-Event and Date format although I'm moving onto the Year-Month-Date/Eve/Photo Taker format now that I just got a new camera. Often I get photos from one event (such as a costume party) from 2 or 3 friends as well as the ones I take so that's why I have a "Taker" field now.

As for miscellaneous pictures I usually save them according to broad subject. I've got a folder for Photoshop work, wallpapers, 4chan/forum work and others similar.

Tagging isn't there yet, but I will tag things I upload to Flickr.

PetiePal