Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)

Mainly, the more complex tags which can themselves refer to other tags.

1. This is probably the trickiest one. You may be able to do some sort of translation between a hierarchical system and the tag system using tags themselves. You could have a series of tags that refer to each other, such that the hierarchical location is essentially encoded in the tags themselves.

2. Again, maybe just special tags?

3. Yeah, again, tags. Just tag the thing with the media it's on.

4. Aside from the basic UI side of things which should help, there is the idea of shared tagging systems. I don't recall if that came from the author or another commenter on HN. And you can basically ask the same question about hierarchical systems. It's not exactly a solved problem there either.

5. Again, the complex tags. Just make a tag for the project.

6. Obviously UI is a big question. I'm not sure how it relates so much to media-specific browsers though. They basically present a different view of a section of a filesystem. You have to do some work to let them do this, or else use a system like iTunes and buy all of your media through them.

7. Although I feel this is well addressed by the author, one thing I think you aren't considering is that each of these applications requires their own setup in order to provide that view. You often can't just take the directory from one of these programs and use a different program to view it and have it all work properly. If you only have one program for each media type and never want to use anything else that works, sort of. Many years ago I directed iTunes to redo the file layout for my music collection and rendered it effectively useless for direct browsing. I never really recovered from that due to the time involved to sort it out.

And mutability isn't totally handwaved away, again with the complex tag system you could tag mutated works with a reference back to the original. This doesn't cover the case where you don't wish to retain the original, but then you could just do a simple find/replace with the old and new hashes in the simplest case.

Unfortunately, Microsoft changed their mind and kinda-deprecated-but-not-completely-eliminated libraries in Windows 10. They also added a whole bunch of similar features that don't fully replace the functionality that libraries used to offer. Now there are at least four different places where the same content might be shown: Quick access, folders under This PC, folders in the actual drives (also under This PC), and Libraries (if you choose to display them). It's an unholy mess that needs registry hacks to clean up.

On the other hand, when you're stuck with a flat hierarchy anyway (e.g. thousands of pictures, all named DCIMxxxx.jpg), tags can be more useful. But only if they're automatic.

I want the best of both worlds. I want to organize my stuff into folders and use tags to search for individual items. There's no need to be a purist on either side. "Designing better file organization around tags" is a good thing. "Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies" is not.