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> "I wouldn't store a book about scuba diving with or relate it to my vacation pictures of me scuba diving in any way in real life" You don't put every single

> "I wouldn't store a book about scuba diving with or relate it to my vacation pictures of me scuba diving in any way in real life" You don't put every single physical item you have relating to scuba into one big bucket because in the physical world, putting something into one bucket precludes it from being placed into another bucket. When you are organizing things you have to anticipate your most likely queries in advanced. So maybe you have one shelf for science fiction, and another for marine wildlife, and another for all your programming language books. For a while, this works well enough. One book can't go on two shelves, but with few enough books that's not a deal breaker. However, when your personal library grows large enough, this system rapidly becomes impractical. At this point, the librarian resorts to creating a card catalogue, categorizing books by author, subject, etc. Books which have numerous topics have numerous cards in the card catalogue. Since this is the 21st century, card catalogues are now digitized. The digitization of card catalogues saves space, but more importantly it facilitates more powerful queries. You can grab two different stacks of cards, relating to two separate topics, and instantly find the intersection between them. That is, the list of books which appear in both stacks. This greatly reduces the number of cards you must look through to find a book that you're quite certain is in both of the stacks. For instance each stack might have a thousand cards, but the intersection of those two stacks might only be 50 cards. That's 50 cards you have to search through to find your book, instead of a thousand. A file tagging system is a digital card catalogue for your files. And as librarian of your library, you can decide which subjects warrant their own tags and which don't. What you don't have to do is decide ahead of time what sort of queries you want to facilitate. And it's no longer important to keep your collection of books and photographs separated. If you want a book, you intersect whatever you're looking for with the card stack of all books. If you want a photograph, you intersect it with the card stack of all photographs. If you have a book of photographs, it could even be in both, should you want it to be.

grawprog 8y ago
It's not a matter of not having the physical space, it's a matter of my brain doesn't associate things that way. My computer isn't a library. It's a box full of my things. It's got my pictures, documents, music, movies, programming, music, art and miscellaneous projects, and various other things all stored where i need them to be. I don't need a relational database or tagging system for them. Everything's got a place based on its type or purpose for existing on my computer. When i look for things on my computer, i don't have a vague concept of an idea of a thing i'm looking for, i look for specific things for specific purposes. Why would i need everything on my computer related to cats showing up if i'm looking for say, a cat sprite in a game i'm working on vs a picture of my cat or say a cat meme? I have no need for the other two things if i'm looking for one of those things. Yet in your system all those things and more would show up should i search for cat. That's pointless. I'd rather navigate to my programming projects and assets folder for my cat sprite, and go to my pictures folder for my own cat or meme cats. There's not many situations where i'd ever need all three at once. For a library or massive database, sure, a file system may be insufficient. But as system for organizing things i need and use for specific purposes, it's not ideal.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  > "When i look for things on my computer, i don't have a vague concept of an idea of a thing i'm looking for, i look for specific things for specific purposes." What you're describing is that this sort of system excels at. By describing the properties of the specific file you're looking for, the tagging system can locate it very rapidly. Without a tagging system, knowing the file you're looking for is like knowing the bookshelf your book is on. If the book shelf is small, you can look at each book in sequence and find the one you're looking for. When your bookshelf is very long, it pays to reduce the set of files you're looking for. >"Why would i need everything on my computer related to cats showing up if i'm looking for say, a cat sprite in a game i'm working on vs a picture of my cat or say a cat meme? I have no need for the other two things if i'm looking for one of those things." If you have a single cat sprite, and search the intersection of 'cat' and 'sprite', then that single cat sprite would be returned to you. Consider instead you have in mind a particular photograph of a cat and a dog, on a car. Perhaps you know you put that image in your cats directory, which has a thousand images because you're an avid fan of cats. To find that particular cat image, you'd need to search through a thousand images sequentially, unless you happen to remember the precise filename of that single image out of a thousand. Thumbnails will help, but that search is still going to take way longer than it should. If your collection of cat images is properly tagged, then you can instantly get a list of the intersection between cat, dog, and car. That list is going to be much shorter than 1000 images. It will take you seconds at most to glance through it and find the precise image you were looking for. With terabyte harddrives being dirt cheap commodities, there is no real reason the average person couldn't or shouldn't have hundreds of thousands to millions of files at least. The reason most people don't is because with the organizational software currently available to them, (e.g. windows explorer) there is no feasible way for them to keep that many files organized. There is no good reason that should be the case.

grawprog 8y ago

It's not a matter of not having the physical space, it's a matter of my brain doesn't associate things that way. My computer isn't a library. It's a box full of my things. It's got my pictures, documents, music, movies, programming, music, art and miscellaneous projects, and various other things all stored where i need them to be. I don't need a relational database or tagging system for them. Everything's got a place based on its type or purpose for existing on my computer. When i look for things on my computer, i don't have a vague concept of an idea of a thing i'm looking for, i look for specific things for specific purposes. Why would i need everything on my computer related to cats showing up if i'm looking for say, a cat sprite in a game i'm working on vs a picture of my cat or say a cat meme? I have no need for the other two things if i'm looking for one of those things. Yet in your system all those things and more would show up should i search for cat. That's pointless. I'd rather navigate to my programming projects and assets folder for my cat sprite, and go to my pictures folder for my own cat or meme cats. There's not many situations where i'd ever need all three at once. For a library or massive database, sure, a file system may be insufficient. But as system for organizing things i need and use for specific purposes, it's not ideal.

darkpuma 8y ago
> "When i look for things on my computer, i don't have a vague concept of an idea of a thing i'm looking for, i look for specific things for specific purposes." What you're describing is that this sort of system excels at. By describing the properties of the specific file you're looking for, the tagging system can locate it very rapidly. Without a tagging system, knowing the file you're looking for is like knowing the bookshelf your book is on. If the book shelf is small, you can look at each book in sequence and find the one you're looking for. When your bookshelf is very long, it pays to reduce the set of files you're looking for. >"Why would i need everything on my computer related to cats showing up if i'm looking for say, a cat sprite in a game i'm working on vs a picture of my cat or say a cat meme? I have no need for the other two things if i'm looking for one of those things." If you have a single cat sprite, and search the intersection of 'cat' and 'sprite', then that single cat sprite would be returned to you. Consider instead you have in mind a particular photograph of a cat and a dog, on a car. Perhaps you know you put that image in your cats directory, which has a thousand images because you're an avid fan of cats. To find that particular cat image, you'd need to search through a thousand images sequentially, unless you happen to remember the precise filename of that single image out of a thousand. Thumbnails will help, but that search is still going to take way longer than it should. If your collection of cat images is properly tagged, then you can instantly get a list of the intersection between cat, dog, and car. That list is going to be much shorter than 1000 images. It will take you seconds at most to glance through it and find the precise image you were looking for. With terabyte harddrives being dirt cheap commodities, there is no real reason the average person couldn't or shouldn't have hundreds of thousands to millions of files at least. The reason most people don't is because with the organizational software currently available to them, (e.g. windows explorer) there is no feasible way for them to keep that many files organized. There is no good reason that should be the case.