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I do the same. This is the only way to organize things, by date. I do the same with documents. I don't even want to think about categories, ontologies are a

I do the same. This is the only way to organize things, by date. I do the same with documents. I don't even want to think about categories, ontologies are always wrong. But today is 2022-02-24, no two ways about it. It's automatic, there's no need to think or decide anything, so it's not a big deal, you just do it. You can't make a mistake. The thought of needing to properly tag every document I file is enough to make that a task I want to postpone. So it wont get done. That's a worse filesystem right there, because it doesn't exist.

silon42 5y ago
I agree that sorting by date/time is 90% correct default view of the data. Most file managers have this wrong. It should be especially easy to have a full sub-tree view sorted by date, but it typically isn't.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  None of the files in the 1997 tree have a file date anywhere near that old, the drive they are on wasn't created until decades later. For me, there is only one durable, universally supported tag for those files, which is the folder structure. Due to the way cameras number photos, for any given photo file name, there are likely 5-10 other different photos with the same name. You might be tempted to then call for a standard tag that would be supported, but what about files relating to things of unknown dates? Fossils, antiques, draft x of the Declaration of Independence, or of things planned in the future, with dates still in flux? Having one canonical path and filename for a given collection of bits is a really effective tool, that I doubt will be surpassed any time soon. However, the next best thing, in my humble opinion, is to use a cryptographic hash of the file in question, as Git does internally. You could map a filesystem interface to a data store based on Git, as long as you don't expect high speed writes to work with performance. (because new checksums require computing across the entire file, even if only 1 bit changes)
tremon 5y ago
But look at the path components: they're not organizing things just by date. The files are first organized by purpose (long-term storage), then by origin, and only then by date. So they've already made the decision to commit the files to long-term storage, and to keep the original photos separate from subsequent edits, and to keep them separate from other image sources (e.g. downloads). That "tagging" required very little effort because they could just navigate to the existing tag in the filesystem, and put the new files there.
kalleboo 5y ago
> This is the only way to organize things, by date. I am terrible at dates - if I had to find photos by date I'd never find them. For anything older than a month that isn't on a known anniversary like a birthday, 90% of the time I find the photos using the map view in iCloud Photo Library. If I was limited to a filesystem view, my photo library would be far less useful.

silon42 5y ago

I agree that sorting by date/time is 90% correct default view of the data. Most file managers have this wrong. It should be especially easy to have a full sub-tree view sorted by date, but it typically isn't.

mikewarot 5y ago
None of the files in the 1997 tree have a file date anywhere near that old, the drive they are on wasn't created until decades later. For me, there is only one durable, universally supported tag for those files, which is the folder structure. Due to the way cameras number photos, for any given photo file name, there are likely 5-10 other different photos with the same name. You might be tempted to then call for a standard tag that would be supported, but what about files relating to things of unknown dates? Fossils, antiques, draft x of the Declaration of Independence, or of things planned in the future, with dates still in flux? Having one canonical path and filename for a given collection of bits is a really effective tool, that I doubt will be surpassed any time soon. However, the next best thing, in my humble opinion, is to use a cryptographic hash of the file in question, as Git does internally. You could map a filesystem interface to a data store based on Git, as long as you don't expect high speed writes to work with performance. (because new checksums require computing across the entire file, even if only 1 bit changes)

tremon 5y ago

But look at the path components: they're not organizing things just by date. The files are first organized by purpose (long-term storage), then by origin, and only then by date. So they've already made the decision to commit the files to long-term storage, and to keep the original photos separate from subsequent edits, and to keep them separate from other image sources (e.g. downloads). That "tagging" required very little effort because they could just navigate to the existing tag in the filesystem, and put the new files there.

kalleboo 5y ago

> This is the only way to organize things, by date. I am terrible at dates - if I had to find photos by date I'd never find them. For anything older than a month that isn't on a known anniversary like a birthday, 90% of the time I find the photos using the map view in iCloud Photo Library. If I was limited to a filesystem view, my photo library would be far less useful.