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> for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging. I understand that this is a very subjective thing... but folders offer an exclusion which isn't immediate

> for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging. I understand that this is a very subjective thing... but folders offer an exclusion which isn't immediately available via tagging. Tagging is implicitly an OR operation. Now, your search engine might offer ways to add "not X", but it's a tradeoff. It you have highly-compartmentalized bits of info you end up with the problem of "how much do have to explicitly exclude from my search?". It's complicated. Personally, I think we're missing a level of organization somehow.

em-bee 5y ago
not sure i follow. can you give an example how exclusion works? all i see is that without using symlinks i can have only one folder/tag per item. i can choose to do that with tags too if i want, but i don't see how using folders helps with that other than forcing me to do it.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  If you can nest folders, then a thing is all of its parent folders in addition to the folder it is directly contained in. This is the AND relationship, which you don't get with most tagging systems. To highlight exclusion, consider an example- folder Animals with subfolders Cats and Dogs. A thing can be either a cat or a dog, but not both.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    but that's just tagging discipline. if i tag an animal with cat and dog, that's obviously wrong. but i don't need folders to help me avoid that mistake. if an object has five tags, it is all those things. that looks like an AND relationship to me. the rest is search. if your tagging system only does OR searches, then that's indeed a problem, but of the implementation, not of the concept. and there is no reason both can't coexist. one application that i use extensively is kphotalbum. it allows me to organize photos by tags, categories, date, folders and other attributes all at the same time. i can navigate and search photos based on all of those attributes. usually i drill down a folder, and then pick tags from within that folder, or i pick tags at the the top level and then work with the folder structure of the selected images. ironically, kphotoalbum does not do well on OR relationships or exclusion of specific attributes. i often use temporary tags to help me there, which kphotoalbum makes trivially easy to use
yellowapple 5y ago
> Tagging is implicitly an OR operation. Doesn't have to be. I can't think of many tag-based search systems that default to OR; usually the default is AND, and that's pretty sensible. There are plenty of text-based search systems that default to OR, though (see also: pretty much every mainstream search engine), and it makes searching a fucking nightmare, so I definitely get the aversion.

em-bee 5y ago

not sure i follow. can you give an example how exclusion works? all i see is that without using symlinks i can have only one folder/tag per item. i can choose to do that with tags too if i want, but i don't see how using folders helps with that other than forcing me to do it.

zdragnar 5y ago
If you can nest folders, then a thing is all of its parent folders in addition to the folder it is directly contained in. This is the AND relationship, which you don't get with most tagging systems. To highlight exclusion, consider an example- folder Animals with subfolders Cats and Dogs. A thing can be either a cat or a dog, but not both.
- em-bee 5y ago
  but that's just tagging discipline. if i tag an animal with cat and dog, that's obviously wrong. but i don't need folders to help me avoid that mistake. if an object has five tags, it is all those things. that looks like an AND relationship to me. the rest is search. if your tagging system only does OR searches, then that's indeed a problem, but of the implementation, not of the concept. and there is no reason both can't coexist. one application that i use extensively is kphotalbum. it allows me to organize photos by tags, categories, date, folders and other attributes all at the same time. i can navigate and search photos based on all of those attributes. usually i drill down a folder, and then pick tags from within that folder, or i pick tags at the the top level and then work with the folder structure of the selected images. ironically, kphotoalbum does not do well on OR relationships or exclusion of specific attributes. i often use temporary tags to help me there, which kphotoalbum makes trivially easy to use

yellowapple 5y ago

> Tagging is implicitly an OR operation. Doesn't have to be. I can't think of many tag-based search systems that default to OR; usually the default is AND, and that's pretty sensible. There are plenty of text-based search systems that default to OR, though (see also: pretty much every mainstream search engine), and it makes searching a fucking nightmare, so I definitely get the aversion.