6 ms·

Why Folders are holding back hassle-free File Management & Tags are the Future.

20 points by cedel2k1 14y ago

webwanderings 14y ago
Has Microsoft done away with folders in their upcoming OS? Just curious. What about the file systems of other OS's out there? It is indeed true that folders are the least efficient aspect of operating systems but it is strange that we're still holding on to them.
- danopia 14y ago
  Windows 8 still has folders.
- bsphil 14y ago
  No. Metro is just an interface. Curious, how would an OS work with no folders? All the system files just have a "system" tag? Personally, I've learned folders. Now I have trouble thinking about a filesystem that wouldn't have them. How would you organize files on a physical disk with no file structure?
  - jessriedel 14y ago
    You can do away with folders in the user experience without getting rid of them under the hood. They are pretty indispensable for how software is structured.
  - webwanderings 14y ago
    The folders are important of course but they should be very few at the top. A system's folder and User's folder. Rest all should be tags.
- Splines 14y ago
  I don't know if you could call it the "least efficient" - they seem (to me) to be a simple way to understand what and where something is. Look at the problem users are having with Mountain Lion's "Save As" feature to see what could go awry once you start abstracting the user away from files.
  - webwanderings 14y ago
    Regarding what and where something is... Let's look at two examples of most-used aspect of folders. A document file and photograph file. For me, the least efficient aspect comes with not being able to store a single document at multiple places (folders). If I have a document on Subject A written by Author B and C (two authors), than I may want to have this single document show up at multiple places, for example, the Subject A for me could be XYZ, ABC etc. The best I can do is create shortcuts of this file in a multiple folders (I shouldn't duplicate the file). So here, the tags would come handy. Now, I don't know about you but I have spent significant amount of time thinking over how to folder my photographs (and I am not a professional so not talking in GIGs). All in all, the folders are not very efficient on their own.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  If they did away with folders, no existing software that was written for a prior version of Windows could possibly work -- you would need to write a new version of every program which was not dependent on folders in any way. This would be a lot of work, since all existing software looks for users' files in folders, looks for its own internal configuration files in folders, loads DLLs from paths which are lists of folders, creates folders to put itself into when it's installed, calls APIs to open files with hierarchical names, uses current and temporary directories, etc., etc. This is true for every operating system that I can think of, not just Windows.
rjzzleep 14y ago
"oh I just forgot to explicitely mark this file as private, now everyone in the world can see it" - how about no ?
evanhamilton 14y ago
While I do like tags for myself, they are also inherently problematic with a group. I tag a photo of my friend "Chardo" (his nickname). Friend #2 tags another photo of him "Richard" (his real name). Now viewing all items tagged "Richard" won't show all the photos of Richard. (Replace human names with names of places, descriptions ["bbq" vs "tom's party"], etc) Do you have any plans for how to address this?
- maxerickson 14y ago
  There's not really any need to address it specially. Tags only get added to the extent that users care, so mismatches are a problem of abundance, and to the extent tags are meaningful/accurate, they facilitate editing to personal preference. I'm sure that successful file managers will also have some degree of fuzzy matching. But tags are still useful, even if we never realize the RDF dream of a perfect global ontology.
  - secabeen 14y ago
    Do they, though? I'm not very good at remembering which tags I use, and once you have hundreds of documents sharing a single tag, if you mis-tag a new file, you may never find it again. Folders make using previous organizational decisions easier than creating a new organization. Incentivizing that behavior is a net win.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      Do what what? I'm not all gaga over tags, keeping 'primary organizational tags' around makes lots of sense to me. We can even keep on calling them folders. My point is that you really have to construct a silly, user-hostile system for a tagging capability to actually make things worse than no tagging.
japhyr 14y ago
Tags are good in conjunction with folders, because they provide another way to search when you forget where a file is, and you don't remember the file name. But folders are really good at collecting files with a similar purpose together. Does a good tagging system have a notion of a "collection" or something, instead of just categories and tags. If so, it just seems like folders by a different name. Moving away from folders entirely, I would be wary of losing track of some seldom-used files completely. But maybe this is just as much about how files are stored on disk, and disk efficiency.
- roc 14y ago
  The ideal implementation of tags (at least during the transition) is tags as pseudo-folders. That is, you drop a document into "Projects"->"2012"->"Foo" and the flexibility of tags is simply hidden away until needed. When it is needed, that file can also be 'added to' the 'folders' "Teams"->"Alpha" and "Clients"->"XYZ Corp". So, sort of like folders by a different name. But more like folders++. With complexity hidden until desired. How files are physically stored is neither here nor there.
  - funthree 14y ago
    This seems the most intuitive. You could have some flattened view of a folder where it shows everything with tags, or you could navigate by folders. So if you have two folders and two subfolders by the same name, with the flattened view you can see all of the similar items. However, doing away with hierarchical folder structure is a bad idea. > module-1 > views > other-thing > views > module-2 > views > module-3 > views
    - roc 14y ago
      Eventually users might get to the point that the hierarchy is unnecessary. Surely it's more efficient to type out "2012, foo, xyz corp, alpha". And it's certainly easier to type out a few tags than navigate a few trees to do a search. But people have stubbornly resisted that for so long, I wouldn't hold my breath. [1] [1] It seems just about every document management system since the 90s was designed under the "search, don't scan!" assumption, stubbornly clinging to theoretical efficiency and then grumpily (and often painfully) adding back in 'artificial' folder structures built from the tags for both file->open and file->save UI.
pupppet 14y ago
What do these people who continually trash the concept of folders do for a living? Do they even work at all?
jessriedel 14y ago
People have known that folders are doomed for a while now. For instance, it's been part of Gmail's core philosophy since it was launched 8 years. The question is when the major operating systems are going to phase it out from the user experience. (Presumably, folder hierarchies will still exist under the hood.)
- tarr11 14y ago
  I don't see folders going away. (I like them much better than tags, frankly) Google Docs started out with no folders. They added them with Google Drive http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375053 http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... EverNote used to just have tags. Now they have "stacks", which seem to be hierarchical tags. I'm not sure who really uses that kind of stuff, it seems like quite a bit of work DropBox is obviously predicated on the idea of folders.
  - jessriedel 14y ago
    GoogleDoc has them because it's integrated with GoogleDrive. GoogleDrive and DropBox have them for the same reason: for compatibility with the existing OS paradigm. This doesn't say much about the inevitability of the demise of folders except that Google and DropBox recognize that it won't happen for many years. But this is obvious given that Windows 8 and Mac OS X are both built on folders. (I don't know anything about EverNote.)
bsphil 14y ago
How would this file system work for the non-technical user? I'm sure there will be plenty more people chiming in on the inefficiency and inferiority of the folder structure, but how about the average user? Genuinely curious. The more I think about this type of system, the more questions I have. It seems like you would only want to use this with a SSD or other non-disk based storage.
- barik 14y ago
  "How would this file system work for the non-technical user?" It does raise a number of questions that aren't immediately obvious without immediately falling back to a hybrid approach, even if it's internally. But then, you're back to folder structures again, just in a way that is opaque to the user. For me, I was actually curious how existing namespaces in languages that are so intertwined with nested folder structures would now work (such as Java and Python).
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    Not to mention web browsers and web servers, which expect URLs to map to a hierarchical file system. E.g., http://example.com/dir1/dir2/foo.htm http://example.com/dir1/dir2/foo.htm.
achacha 14y ago
This is one of those "bad ideas" that someone thinks is revolutionary. Welcome to the 70s and stay there.
slantyyz 14y ago
There have been tagging apps that I've tried in the past (i.e. http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/ http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/) but in my experience, tagging is significantly more work than using folders.
egypturnash 14y ago
I tried tagging my files for a while. I quit. Part of it was that tagging is done via an add-on, of course, and it added an additional step to creating a file. But I also feel like there are a lot of problems that need to be solved about streamlining the process of tagging files, dealing with typos, and auto-creating maps of the tag structure. And even if we did move to a wholly tag-based userland, your non-technical relative/coworker would STILL find ways to lose their documents. Maybe tagging will be a better way. But I think "files" in "folders" have survived for the entire history of file systems for a good reason - they're conceptually simple for our brains to manipulate. There's enough of an aura of physicality to them that we can leverage the part of our brain that's good at storing maps. Honestly I think the way to move forwards is more along the lines of Raskin[1] - interfaces designed to make things MORE spatial - than into tags, which are incredibly ethereal to our brains. Files and folders are, I think, a local maxima of efficiency. Tags may be more efficient in the long run, but there's a painful trough of uselessness to trudge through before we can get there. (Other problems I see with tags: - importing existing filesystems, without losing the existing hierarchies - do YOU want to go back and manually tag every file you've ever made and are still holding on to? - can't control the importance of information. Sure, that project you just finished gets drawn huge in your tag cloud. But it's done, you want to move on, you don't even want to think about it right now because you're in the middle of the next one. - suggesting tags as you type is not good enough, there needs to be a lot more work put into associating tags, so that if I'm saving a file with, say, the tag for my current comics project, I'm instantly presented with the associated tags of "web final images", "book file images", "fan art", "model sheets", and various subtags of those. ) [1]: http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php - and now I kinda want to try that out again, it's been a while.
- FixThisPOSSite 14y ago
  Not to mention that the assertions in this proposal are ridiculous: "In reality, the number of items you can store in a folder is limited while computer folders have unlimited capacity" So what? Who on earth is troubled by this? Weak attempt to create a problem where none exists. "Another glitch is the possibility to store folders in folders which is not possible in real live." Also wrong. It's quite possible to store folders in folders in real life. And you can put folders in boxes, which are nothing but a different-shaped folder. Again, this is a lame attempt to shore up a weak argument with sham "problems."
yason 14y ago
Again, BeOS had a working indexing system so the folders it supported didn't effectively matter and no tagging was needed. Of course, you could create virtual folders for queries. What made the difference to other indexing systems was that the queries were fast and real time because it was all implemented in the file system itself. That's what's needed to make people first trust indexing and subsequently use it as a daily tool, like we use 'ls'.
leishulang 14y ago
I do agree that files/folders are bad in general, but tags will probably not fit the bill too. I think the future file system should be lying within graph theory. Something like semantic web, if you create a file, you need to create at least one semantic link to other files. if you remove one, you need to bridge the separated graphs. But how the semantic link could make sense for human, requires far more work and research I guess.
sliverstorm 14y ago
If you wanted to "tag" files, could you not simply create hard links to the files inside a folder "tagname"? Of course, using hard links is currently not easy for the technically incompetent, but you could change that, and it ought to be easier as you're just interfacing with existing capability.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  How do you search for files with multiple tags? E.g.: "Taxes" AND "2009"
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Good question. As a first pass, I'd think a search assistant that runs two searches in the background and takes the intersection of the results. I'm a big fan of building on existing capabilities, as you can probably tell. One other thought- in Explorer or Finder, is it possible to search within a set of search results?
yaantc 14y ago
Tags are not a replacement for folders, and the opposite is true too. A folder defines a directed graph. Combining tags loose the "directed" part. It may be good enough for some, but it's not the same and will fall short in some cases. This difference is the 1st point mentioned in the article. The article says that it's inflexible. In some cases yes, then use tags. In other cases, it will be exactly what's needed and tags will be cumbersome. The two other limitations (related to searching and sharing) are bogus IMHO. They're not limitation of a folder system, but maybe of some implementation.
3amOpsGuy 14y ago
Folders work standalone, tags don't. Tags don't work without a search feature - we might tag religiously but others don't and won't. If you're implementing a search feature then you no longer need tags. It won't take off. Especially as these days we seem to be moving away from files full stop.
joe_the_user 14y ago
Currently, I am working on a file management tool that uses tags fairly heavily. Obviously I think tags can be useful. But the claim that folders can or should be eliminated is seriously misguided. * Tags aren't enough once your file number exceeds a certain amount. * File path provides a unique human-readable and human-understand identifier for everyone's file. A system where pieces of data don't have unique identifier is going to be serious drag at some point. Even average people need logical consistency occasionally. * While folders may be a somewhat hard metaphor for new and casual users to understand, so are tags. A many-to-many relationship isn't actually something people quickly understand fully even if they can quickly get fuzzy understanding it. * When you throw out the spatial metaphor of folders and files, you've thrown out the guarantee that a file is "somewhere". I've lost and seen other lose files in a disturbing fashion on MACs. Without a keyword for file X, that you just uploaded, you can't "look around" for it.
- barrkel 14y ago
  Indeed. Have enough tags (and with files, you'll end up with enough tags) and you'll need ontologies for those tags; you'll end up recreating hierarchical structure out of naming conventions. The same tag "name" within different contexts will have different meanings, and the concept of "context" by itself tends towards hierarchy of analytic decomposition.
- bsphil 14y ago
  >A system where pieces of data don't have unique identifier is going to be serious drag at some point Reminds me of trying to organize/tag my mp3 library. Those fringe cases of imperfect tagging get so cumbersome to manage. Also, with folders, it's so easy to just dump x number of files into a folder and have it organized. Batch tag editing just isn't as intuitive. Now I have an Android and use that as my mp3 player, and Poweramp has a "Folders" view that I almost exclusively use.
rubyruy 14y ago
Pfshaw, tags are old hat. They are also just a re-hashing of the humble search keyword of olde. The real new hat is search and all major OSes are doing this more or less correctly now. I don't recall the last time I browsed to a document. Also worth mentioning that the concept of "documents" is itself a quickly aging hat. With some very few exceptions most documents are tied pretty closely to just one app and apps and those apps in turn can have more specific ways of handling those documents (i.e. projects, libraries etc). The internal representation of files and programatic access is another matter - we do need a better way to segregate access and assign metadata to files. Possibly a relational file system would be the way to go, but it's not a problem that very urgently needs solving for anyone so nothing too exciting there for a while....
drharris 14y ago
The obvious benefit to using tagging is that tags can be anything. The obvious detriment to using tagging is that tags can be anything. Take, for example, a contact in an address book. Did I tag "contact", "friend", "acquaintance", "people I know", or something else? How do I know what to search for? Obviously a contrived example but it easily extends for any type of document; put simply, a hierarchy is much easier to remember than a "cloud" of unlimited options. Not to mention the time it takes to save a file in a hierarchy versus tagging (how many tags should I use for optimal performance?) I think the true future is in a hybrid. Improve the metadata on a file (Windows is making giant leaps in this territory), improve file search indexing and capabilities, and retain a hierarchy. This allows ease of both searching and browsing, and is not any different from what we're doing today (no retraining Grandma).
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  One way to deal with ambiguous tags is to use aliases and related-to indicators. But I agree with you that a system can't discard the file hierarchy without discarding important qualities many people need.
  - drharris 14y ago
    That's of course a good point. However, one of the things the tagging proponents claim is that tagging reduces the effort of taxonomy. Having to manage aliases and tag links would then negate any such benefit, and might even be much more time consuming. Now, were we to talk about some standard of tagging that has link relationships baked in, we might be talking. But then we sacrifice customization.
robomartin 14y ago
Let's see. I'm sitting in front of a workstation with about ten gigabytes of data. It stores all manner of projects, from pure mechanical to pure electronics as well as software-only products. They are organized quite well by product or project as required. Each product lives in a stand-alone directory that is fully self-contained. Need to work on that project on another workstation? Clone it or fork it onto that workstation and you have all files relevant to that project and nothing else. This method works very well and has been in use for quite some time across multiple workstations, operating system revisions, tools and software revisions as well as a number of engineers. The only effort required in order to maintain this system is to abide by common sense agreed-upon directory structures. For example, if working on an electro-mechanical project, the fasteners might go in the "Fasteners" directory under the "Mechanical" folder and the embedded software might go under "Software", which, in turn, lives within the "Electronics" directory. Not tagging. Nothing that can get lost or royally FUBAR'ed if tags are lost or corrupted, etc. Just a darn simple file cabinet analog that works very well and is perfectly usable, easy to understand and fully searchable. Don't get me wrong, I like tags. They are great for certain applications. I just don't see them as practical for anything I've ever touched in terms of project or file management.
edwinyzh 14y ago
Yes, managing files (especially documents) with tags is a good idea in many cases, but not all cases. I had an idea for a tag-based file manager for Windows, I even have registered a domain which I think is cool - taganizer.com = tag + organizer But I didn't go for that idea for various reasons, I'm now working on http://liveditor.com http://liveditor.com.
teilo 14y ago
Yet another company promoting a file management app to fix a problem that does not exist. It's not even particularly unique. I've seen at least dozen such solutions. Even tried a couple of them (Anyone remember Brain - an associative array file management platform?). I always gave them up. The real problem, I think, is that folders reflect reality. Tags do not. Most people are think of a file as belonging in one specific category. So you tag it as such. Very few people would bother trying to remember multiple tags to apply to their files. The process of organization is too cumbersome, so you stop doing it. So what do you get if you only apply a single tag to a file? You get a flat list of folders. If the tags have a hierarchy, you get exactly the same thing as using folders. So why bother with tags? With my Email I don't even use folders. In that case, I don't bother organizing anything. Search works just fine for me. In fact, search works just fine for most of my files these days.
- robomartin 14y ago
  "folders reflect reality" +1
  - jmathai 14y ago
    I fought tooth and nail to not support proper albums for The OpenPhoto Project. After about 6 months I gave in and we implemented a native album API[1] (not something that rides on top of tags). It's true. The argument that tags do everything that albums do and more is false. Perhaps for an engineer but the brain thinks in terms of albums (or folders for files). Nature or nurture, it doesn't matter. This is not a battle you win with engineering. [1] https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/issues/124 https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/issues/124

20 points by cedel2k1 14y ago

Has Microsoft done away with folders in their upcoming OS? Just curious. What about the file systems of other OS's out there? It is indeed true that folders are the least efficient aspect of operating systems but it is strange that we're still holding on to them.

danopia 14y ago
Windows 8 still has folders.
bsphil 14y ago
No. Metro is just an interface. Curious, how would an OS work with no folders? All the system files just have a "system" tag? Personally, I've learned folders. Now I have trouble thinking about a filesystem that wouldn't have them. How would you organize files on a physical disk with no file structure?
- jessriedel 14y ago
  You can do away with folders in the user experience without getting rid of them under the hood. They are pretty indispensable for how software is structured.
- webwanderings 14y ago
  The folders are important of course but they should be very few at the top. A system's folder and User's folder. Rest all should be tags.
Splines 14y ago
I don't know if you could call it the "least efficient" - they seem (to me) to be a simple way to understand what and where something is. Look at the problem users are having with Mountain Lion's "Save As" feature to see what could go awry once you start abstracting the user away from files.
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Regarding what and where something is... Let's look at two examples of most-used aspect of folders. A document file and photograph file. For me, the least efficient aspect comes with not being able to store a single document at multiple places (folders). If I have a document on Subject A written by Author B and C (two authors), than I may want to have this single document show up at multiple places, for example, the Subject A for me could be XYZ, ABC etc. The best I can do is create shortcuts of this file in a multiple folders (I shouldn't duplicate the file). So here, the tags would come handy. Now, I don't know about you but I have spent significant amount of time thinking over how to folder my photographs (and I am not a professional so not talking in GIGs). All in all, the folders are not very efficient on their own.
greenyoda 14y ago
If they did away with folders, no existing software that was written for a prior version of Windows could possibly work -- you would need to write a new version of every program which was not dependent on folders in any way. This would be a lot of work, since all existing software looks for users' files in folders, looks for its own internal configuration files in folders, loads DLLs from paths which are lists of folders, creates folders to put itself into when it's installed, calls APIs to open files with hierarchical names, uses current and temporary directories, etc., etc. This is true for every operating system that I can think of, not just Windows.

rjzzleep 14y ago

"oh I just forgot to explicitely mark this file as private, now everyone in the world can see it" - how about no ?

evanhamilton 14y ago

While I do like tags for myself, they are also inherently problematic with a group. I tag a photo of my friend "Chardo" (his nickname). Friend #2 tags another photo of him "Richard" (his real name). Now viewing all items tagged "Richard" won't show all the photos of Richard. (Replace human names with names of places, descriptions ["bbq" vs "tom's party"], etc) Do you have any plans for how to address this?

maxerickson 14y ago
There's not really any need to address it specially. Tags only get added to the extent that users care, so mismatches are a problem of abundance, and to the extent tags are meaningful/accurate, they facilitate editing to personal preference. I'm sure that successful file managers will also have some degree of fuzzy matching. But tags are still useful, even if we never realize the RDF dream of a perfect global ontology.
- secabeen 14y ago
  Do they, though? I'm not very good at remembering which tags I use, and once you have hundreds of documents sharing a single tag, if you mis-tag a new file, you may never find it again. Folders make using previous organizational decisions easier than creating a new organization. Incentivizing that behavior is a net win.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    Do what what? I'm not all gaga over tags, keeping 'primary organizational tags' around makes lots of sense to me. We can even keep on calling them folders. My point is that you really have to construct a silly, user-hostile system for a tagging capability to actually make things worse than no tagging.

japhyr 14y ago

Tags are good in conjunction with folders, because they provide another way to search when you forget where a file is, and you don't remember the file name. But folders are really good at collecting files with a similar purpose together. Does a good tagging system have a notion of a "collection" or something, instead of just categories and tags. If so, it just seems like folders by a different name. Moving away from folders entirely, I would be wary of losing track of some seldom-used files completely. But maybe this is just as much about how files are stored on disk, and disk efficiency.

roc 14y ago
The ideal implementation of tags (at least during the transition) is tags as pseudo-folders. That is, you drop a document into "Projects"->"2012"->"Foo" and the flexibility of tags is simply hidden away until needed. When it is needed, that file can also be 'added to' the 'folders' "Teams"->"Alpha" and "Clients"->"XYZ Corp". So, sort of like folders by a different name. But more like folders++. With complexity hidden until desired. How files are physically stored is neither here nor there.
- funthree 14y ago
  This seems the most intuitive. You could have some flattened view of a folder where it shows everything with tags, or you could navigate by folders. So if you have two folders and two subfolders by the same name, with the flattened view you can see all of the similar items. However, doing away with hierarchical folder structure is a bad idea. > module-1 > views > other-thing > views > module-2 > views > module-3 > views
  - roc 14y ago
    Eventually users might get to the point that the hierarchy is unnecessary. Surely it's more efficient to type out "2012, foo, xyz corp, alpha". And it's certainly easier to type out a few tags than navigate a few trees to do a search. But people have stubbornly resisted that for so long, I wouldn't hold my breath. [1] [1] It seems just about every document management system since the 90s was designed under the "search, don't scan!" assumption, stubbornly clinging to theoretical efficiency and then grumpily (and often painfully) adding back in 'artificial' folder structures built from the tags for both file->open and file->save UI.

pupppet 14y ago

What do these people who continually trash the concept of folders do for a living? Do they even work at all?

jessriedel 14y ago

People have known that folders are doomed for a while now. For instance, it's been part of Gmail's core philosophy since it was launched 8 years. The question is when the major operating systems are going to phase it out from the user experience. (Presumably, folder hierarchies will still exist under the hood.)

tarr11 14y ago
I don't see folders going away. (I like them much better than tags, frankly) Google Docs started out with no folders. They added them with Google Drive http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375053 http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... EverNote used to just have tags. Now they have "stacks", which seem to be hierarchical tags. I'm not sure who really uses that kind of stuff, it seems like quite a bit of work DropBox is obviously predicated on the idea of folders.
- jessriedel 14y ago
  GoogleDoc has them because it's integrated with GoogleDrive. GoogleDrive and DropBox have them for the same reason: for compatibility with the existing OS paradigm. This doesn't say much about the inevitability of the demise of folders except that Google and DropBox recognize that it won't happen for many years. But this is obvious given that Windows 8 and Mac OS X are both built on folders. (I don't know anything about EverNote.)

bsphil 14y ago

How would this file system work for the non-technical user? I'm sure there will be plenty more people chiming in on the inefficiency and inferiority of the folder structure, but how about the average user? Genuinely curious. The more I think about this type of system, the more questions I have. It seems like you would only want to use this with a SSD or other non-disk based storage.

barik 14y ago
"How would this file system work for the non-technical user?" It does raise a number of questions that aren't immediately obvious without immediately falling back to a hybrid approach, even if it's internally. But then, you're back to folder structures again, just in a way that is opaque to the user. For me, I was actually curious how existing namespaces in languages that are so intertwined with nested folder structures would now work (such as Java and Python).
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Not to mention web browsers and web servers, which expect URLs to map to a hierarchical file system. E.g., http://example.com/dir1/dir2/foo.htm http://example.com/dir1/dir2/foo.htm.

achacha 14y ago

This is one of those "bad ideas" that someone thinks is revolutionary. Welcome to the 70s and stay there.

slantyyz 14y ago

There have been tagging apps that I've tried in the past (i.e. http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/ http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/) but in my experience, tagging is significantly more work than using folders.

egypturnash 14y ago

I tried tagging my files for a while. I quit. Part of it was that tagging is done via an add-on, of course, and it added an additional step to creating a file. But I also feel like there are a lot of problems that need to be solved about streamlining the process of tagging files, dealing with typos, and auto-creating maps of the tag structure. And even if we did move to a wholly tag-based userland, your non-technical relative/coworker would STILL find ways to lose their documents. Maybe tagging will be a better way. But I think "files" in "folders" have survived for the entire history of file systems for a good reason - they're conceptually simple for our brains to manipulate. There's enough of an aura of physicality to them that we can leverage the part of our brain that's good at storing maps. Honestly I think the way to move forwards is more along the lines of Raskin[1] - interfaces designed to make things MORE spatial - than into tags, which are incredibly ethereal to our brains. Files and folders are, I think, a local maxima of efficiency. Tags may be more efficient in the long run, but there's a painful trough of uselessness to trudge through before we can get there. (Other problems I see with tags: - importing existing filesystems, without losing the existing hierarchies - do YOU want to go back and manually tag every file you've ever made and are still holding on to? - can't control the importance of information. Sure, that project you just finished gets drawn huge in your tag cloud. But it's done, you want to move on, you don't even want to think about it right now because you're in the middle of the next one. - suggesting tags as you type is not good enough, there needs to be a lot more work put into associating tags, so that if I'm saving a file with, say, the tag for my current comics project, I'm instantly presented with the associated tags of "web final images", "book file images", "fan art", "model sheets", and various subtags of those. ) [1]: http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php - and now I kinda want to try that out again, it's been a while.

FixThisPOSSite 14y ago
Not to mention that the assertions in this proposal are ridiculous: "In reality, the number of items you can store in a folder is limited while computer folders have unlimited capacity" So what? Who on earth is troubled by this? Weak attempt to create a problem where none exists. "Another glitch is the possibility to store folders in folders which is not possible in real live." Also wrong. It's quite possible to store folders in folders in real life. And you can put folders in boxes, which are nothing but a different-shaped folder. Again, this is a lame attempt to shore up a weak argument with sham "problems."

yason 14y ago

Again, BeOS had a working indexing system so the folders it supported didn't effectively matter and no tagging was needed. Of course, you could create virtual folders for queries. What made the difference to other indexing systems was that the queries were fast and real time because it was all implemented in the file system itself. That's what's needed to make people first trust indexing and subsequently use it as a daily tool, like we use 'ls'.

leishulang 14y ago

I do agree that files/folders are bad in general, but tags will probably not fit the bill too. I think the future file system should be lying within graph theory. Something like semantic web, if you create a file, you need to create at least one semantic link to other files. if you remove one, you need to bridge the separated graphs. But how the semantic link could make sense for human, requires far more work and research I guess.

sliverstorm 14y ago

If you wanted to "tag" files, could you not simply create hard links to the files inside a folder "tagname"? Of course, using hard links is currently not easy for the technically incompetent, but you could change that, and it ought to be easier as you're just interfacing with existing capability.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
How do you search for files with multiple tags? E.g.: "Taxes" AND "2009"
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Good question. As a first pass, I'd think a search assistant that runs two searches in the background and takes the intersection of the results. I'm a big fan of building on existing capabilities, as you can probably tell. One other thought- in Explorer or Finder, is it possible to search within a set of search results?

yaantc 14y ago

Tags are not a replacement for folders, and the opposite is true too. A folder defines a directed graph. Combining tags loose the "directed" part. It may be good enough for some, but it's not the same and will fall short in some cases. This difference is the 1st point mentioned in the article. The article says that it's inflexible. In some cases yes, then use tags. In other cases, it will be exactly what's needed and tags will be cumbersome. The two other limitations (related to searching and sharing) are bogus IMHO. They're not limitation of a folder system, but maybe of some implementation.

3amOpsGuy 14y ago

Folders work standalone, tags don't. Tags don't work without a search feature - we might tag religiously but others don't and won't. If you're implementing a search feature then you no longer need tags. It won't take off. Especially as these days we seem to be moving away from files full stop.

joe_the_user 14y ago

Currently, I am working on a file management tool that uses tags fairly heavily. Obviously I think tags can be useful. But the claim that folders can or should be eliminated is seriously misguided. * Tags aren't enough once your file number exceeds a certain amount. * File path provides a unique human-readable and human-understand identifier for everyone's file. A system where pieces of data don't have unique identifier is going to be serious drag at some point. Even average people need logical consistency occasionally. * While folders may be a somewhat hard metaphor for new and casual users to understand, so are tags. A many-to-many relationship isn't actually something people quickly understand fully even if they can quickly get fuzzy understanding it. * When you throw out the spatial metaphor of folders and files, you've thrown out the guarantee that a file is "somewhere". I've lost and seen other lose files in a disturbing fashion on MACs. Without a keyword for file X, that you just uploaded, you can't "look around" for it.

barrkel 14y ago
Indeed. Have enough tags (and with files, you'll end up with enough tags) and you'll need ontologies for those tags; you'll end up recreating hierarchical structure out of naming conventions. The same tag "name" within different contexts will have different meanings, and the concept of "context" by itself tends towards hierarchy of analytic decomposition.
bsphil 14y ago
>A system where pieces of data don't have unique identifier is going to be serious drag at some point Reminds me of trying to organize/tag my mp3 library. Those fringe cases of imperfect tagging get so cumbersome to manage. Also, with folders, it's so easy to just dump x number of files into a folder and have it organized. Batch tag editing just isn't as intuitive. Now I have an Android and use that as my mp3 player, and Poweramp has a "Folders" view that I almost exclusively use.

rubyruy 14y ago

Pfshaw, tags are old hat. They are also just a re-hashing of the humble search keyword of olde. The real new hat is search and all major OSes are doing this more or less correctly now. I don't recall the last time I browsed to a document. Also worth mentioning that the concept of "documents" is itself a quickly aging hat. With some very few exceptions most documents are tied pretty closely to just one app and apps and those apps in turn can have more specific ways of handling those documents (i.e. projects, libraries etc). The internal representation of files and programatic access is another matter - we do need a better way to segregate access and assign metadata to files. Possibly a relational file system would be the way to go, but it's not a problem that very urgently needs solving for anyone so nothing too exciting there for a while....

drharris 14y ago

The obvious benefit to using tagging is that tags can be anything. The obvious detriment to using tagging is that tags can be anything. Take, for example, a contact in an address book. Did I tag "contact", "friend", "acquaintance", "people I know", or something else? How do I know what to search for? Obviously a contrived example but it easily extends for any type of document; put simply, a hierarchy is much easier to remember than a "cloud" of unlimited options. Not to mention the time it takes to save a file in a hierarchy versus tagging (how many tags should I use for optimal performance?) I think the true future is in a hybrid. Improve the metadata on a file (Windows is making giant leaps in this territory), improve file search indexing and capabilities, and retain a hierarchy. This allows ease of both searching and browsing, and is not any different from what we're doing today (no retraining Grandma).

joe_the_user 14y ago
One way to deal with ambiguous tags is to use aliases and related-to indicators. But I agree with you that a system can't discard the file hierarchy without discarding important qualities many people need.
- drharris 14y ago
  That's of course a good point. However, one of the things the tagging proponents claim is that tagging reduces the effort of taxonomy. Having to manage aliases and tag links would then negate any such benefit, and might even be much more time consuming. Now, were we to talk about some standard of tagging that has link relationships baked in, we might be talking. But then we sacrifice customization.

robomartin 14y ago

Let's see. I'm sitting in front of a workstation with about ten gigabytes of data. It stores all manner of projects, from pure mechanical to pure electronics as well as software-only products. They are organized quite well by product or project as required. Each product lives in a stand-alone directory that is fully self-contained. Need to work on that project on another workstation? Clone it or fork it onto that workstation and you have all files relevant to that project and nothing else. This method works very well and has been in use for quite some time across multiple workstations, operating system revisions, tools and software revisions as well as a number of engineers. The only effort required in order to maintain this system is to abide by common sense agreed-upon directory structures. For example, if working on an electro-mechanical project, the fasteners might go in the "Fasteners" directory under the "Mechanical" folder and the embedded software might go under "Software", which, in turn, lives within the "Electronics" directory. Not tagging. Nothing that can get lost or royally FUBAR'ed if tags are lost or corrupted, etc. Just a darn simple file cabinet analog that works very well and is perfectly usable, easy to understand and fully searchable. Don't get me wrong, I like tags. They are great for certain applications. I just don't see them as practical for anything I've ever touched in terms of project or file management.

edwinyzh 14y ago

Yes, managing files (especially documents) with tags is a good idea in many cases, but not all cases. I had an idea for a tag-based file manager for Windows, I even have registered a domain which I think is cool - taganizer.com = tag + organizer But I didn't go for that idea for various reasons, I'm now working on http://liveditor.com http://liveditor.com.

teilo 14y ago

Yet another company promoting a file management app to fix a problem that does not exist. It's not even particularly unique. I've seen at least dozen such solutions. Even tried a couple of them (Anyone remember Brain - an associative array file management platform?). I always gave them up. The real problem, I think, is that folders reflect reality. Tags do not. Most people are think of a file as belonging in one specific category. So you tag it as such. Very few people would bother trying to remember multiple tags to apply to their files. The process of organization is too cumbersome, so you stop doing it. So what do you get if you only apply a single tag to a file? You get a flat list of folders. If the tags have a hierarchy, you get exactly the same thing as using folders. So why bother with tags? With my Email I don't even use folders. In that case, I don't bother organizing anything. Search works just fine for me. In fact, search works just fine for most of my files these days.

robomartin 14y ago
"folders reflect reality" +1
- jmathai 14y ago
  I fought tooth and nail to not support proper albums for The OpenPhoto Project. After about 6 months I gave in and we implemented a native album API[1] (not something that rides on top of tags). It's true. The argument that tags do everything that albums do and more is false. Perhaps for an engineer but the brain thinks in terms of albums (or folders for files). Nature or nurture, it doesn't matter. This is not a battle you win with engineering. [1] https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/issues/124 https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/issues/124