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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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?<p>- 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.<p>- 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. )<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.raskinformac.com/features.php</a> - and now I kinda want to try that out again, it's been a while.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

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?)<p>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).

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

Tags are not a replacement for folders, and the opposite is true too.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>But maybe this is just as much about how files are stored on disk, and disk efficiency.

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

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.<p>What made the difference to other indexing systems was that the queries were <i>fast</i> and <i>real time</i> 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'.

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?<p>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.

Currently, I am working on a file management tool that uses tags fairly heavily. Obviously I think tags can be useful.<p>But the claim that folders can or should be eliminated is seriously misguided.<p>* Tags aren't enough once your file number exceeds a certain amount.<p>* 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.<p>* While folders may be a somewhat hard metaphor for new and casual users to understand, <i>so are tags</i>. A many-to-many relationship isn't actually something people quickly understand <i>fully</i> even if they can quickly get fuzzy understanding it.<p>* 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.

Pfshaw, tags are old hat. They are also just a re-hashing of the humble search keyword of olde.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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....

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

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)<p>Do you have any plans for how to address this?

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

If you wanted to "tag" files, could you not simply create hard links to the files inside a folder "tagname"?<p>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.

Has Microsoft done away with folders in their upcoming OS? Just curious. What about the file systems of other OS's out there?<p>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.

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.

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

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.)