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

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).

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.

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?

Trivially, you can replace folders with a certain class of tags for which you enforce the folder hierarchy rules. That is, tags of this type are organized in a folder-like hierarchy, and if you want to apply a tag to a file, all the tags above it in the hierarchy are automatically also added to the file. In this way, you could have multiple parallel folder hierarchies if you really wanted to.

But this is obviously messy if you don't do it right. I agree that implementing tags in a way that completely replicates the abilities of folders without burdening the user is non-trivial.

It's not about whether users aren't smart enough for tags. It's whether tags work the way users want them to.

Tags are for organization. People like to organize things in terms of visual hierarchies and landmarks. Raw tagging systems aren't popular, because most people don't memorize precise strings. [1] They remember roughly what directories look like and 'know where things are' based on whether they believe they can confidently determine "it" from "not it" while they navigate a structure.

e.g. Was the tag "RaptorX" or "2012 Predator" or "FooBird"? The user doesn't know. But they do know that when they navigate their project folders, they'll be able to pick out whichever project was fuzzily translated to "something like a bird of prey" in their mind. And they'll be able to do this as they navigate into a tree, as fast as if they had remembered exact strings. [2]

So when people are looking for something quickly, they're going to like the visual hierarchy. And when they're first saving a file [3], or when they're looking to open something when they 'know' where it is, they respond very positively to a visual hierarchy.

It's not about 'hiding' the fact that those 'folders' are tags. Or hiding the fact that files can live in multiple places (with multiple versions no less). We're still talking about new software that people would have to be trained on and told about its particular attributes.

So the fact that, yes, you need a dialogue to capture explicit intentions when doing move/copy operations in a pseudo-folder tag system is not a problem.

[1] Also why command line OSs and command line navigation are unpopular. People really like visual organization.

[2] In my experience, this is what people are really saying when they insist they'd rather navigate than search, even when they 'know' where something is. It's because they "know" where something is, in terms of landmarks in the visual tree. They know in a fuzzy way. And fuzzy searching is either frustrating, or requires nailing down enough tangential data (user/date/file type) that searching isn't any faster than navigating.

[3] Almost no-one wants to think about proper taxonomy or organization or an exhaustive document profile when they're drafting a new document. They just want to stash things somewhere where they can find them tomorrow and/or reasonably direct a third party to them. Proper organization is almost always a discrete mental process that happens after a document is 'done'.