Why Folders are holding back hassle-free File Management & Tags are the Future. • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by webwanderings » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:24 PM UTC

Splines wrote: post #13

webwanderings wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

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

#22

Post by AndrewDucker » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:29 PM UTC

roc wrote: post #11

japhyr wrote: post #7

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…

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…

Of course, folders imply more of a relationship than tags do.

If I'm keeping files on what multiple companies are up to I might have: Company A -> Secrets -> Company B and Company B -> Secrets -> Company A

To denote the secret files that each company is keeping about the other. The tags would be identical, but the folder structures entirely separate.

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

#23

Post by webwanderings » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

bsphil wrote: post #5

webwanderings wrote: post #2

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.

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?

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.

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

#24

Post by slantyyz » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:35 PM UTC

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

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

#25

Post by secabeen » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

roc wrote: post #19

funthree wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 > vi…

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 "searc…

Not necessarily. The biggest problem I've had with tags is consistency. When I'm tagging photos of my kids, every time I have to remember "did I tag these with kids, rebecca, becky, daughter, or children?" It gets tedious. Sure, you can maintain a list of commonly-used tags, but that list often changes on a per workflow basis. Folders give you the benefits of tags with a hierarchy and smaller search space. When I open my work folder, I see a list of each of my projects. From there, I can go into that project, and see directories that are specific to that project. In a tag-based system, I have to remember all of the requisite tags from the beginning, or I have to go through an iterative process adding tags, seeing if I got the right one, and if so, then looking at the new list of suggested tags. Folders let the computer remember how things are organized and lets the human select from that organization.

Also, this article gets the details wrong. For example, you certainly can nest folders in the real world. Take a personnel file cabinet, with a 2012 drawer, with a hang folder for each employee that contains a manila folder labeled timecards. That's 4 levels of nesting and it works fine.

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

#26

Post by tarr11 » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #9

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.)

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&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.

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

#27

Post by bradleyland » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

roc wrote: post #11

japhyr wrote: post #7

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…

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…

I completely disagree with this based on my experiencing working with several companies who moved to Google Apps. Some of these companies are small businesses (10-25 employees), but some are large organizations with hundreds of employees and retail locations around the country.

The problem with tags as pseudo-folders is that it breaks a core promise of "folders". Folders are a metaphor, and when you use a metaphor like files & folders, you're making a promise to the user. You're saying: "I'm making these things familiar to you so that you don't have to learn a new behavior."

To be clear, I have no problem with tags, and I do believe that the standard "hierarchy of folders" we use today is untenable with the volume of documents we generate, but extending folders is a bad idea.

The reason this breaks so badly is that users expect to preserve the basic move/copy dichotomy of a file/folder when we represent items as such. This expectation is rooted in the metaphor of a file or folder in the real world. I cannot place a physical document in to two folders without copying it. When I copy the document, changes made to the replica are not retroactively applied to the parent.

I have seen many Google Docs users lose hours of work because they used the "collections" feature of Google Apps incorrectly. An example, I've seen plenty of users do the following in an attempt to copy a file to a new collection in Google Docs:

* Locate an item that is already in a Collection

* Check the item in the Document List

* Click the "Organize" icon (it's a folder)

* Check the box next to another collection where they want the copy

* Click "Apply Changes"

The vast majority of the users I work with assume that the "same" document cannot exist in two places at once. They assume this because that is the way that files & folders have always worked. If an action results in the appearance of two documents, there are two documents. The item has been copied. It doesn't matter whether the language "copy" is used. The action is implicit in the learned behavior of files & folders.

Tags should be called tags. Users are smarter than you think. As engineers, we might be frustrated by the assumption made above, but in reality, the user is drawing an inference based on past experiences. They're applying conceptual knowledge that we taught them. That's "smart".

Implement a tagging system in a way that solves users' problems and they'll flock to it, but don't make it opaque by masquerading as something they already know.

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

#28

Post by egypturnash » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

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 - and now I kinda want to try that out again, it's been a while.

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

#29

Post by secabeen » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #18

evanhamilton wrote: post #6

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?

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 ontolog…

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.

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

#30

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #22

roc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course, folders imply more of a relationship than tags do. If I'm keeping files on what multiple companies are up to I might have: Company A -> Secrets -> Company B and Company B -> Secrets -> Company A To denote the secret files that each company is keeping about the other. The tags would be identical, but the folder structures entirely separate.

[deleted]