Microsoft’s new idea for a file system is that the entire operating system will store all its data in a huge relational database (probably powered by SQL Server underneath).

This all sounds great. Unfortunately, it was too big and complex to finish in time, and it won’t be in Longhorn. Hopefully it’ll get done soon, the current file system mess is something that’s been driving me pretty nuts, too.

Ultimately, producing queries is not a very intuitive interface. I would envision the ‘Explorer’ as being basically like Picasa is already, but with a lot of visual functionality such as:

* A lot of tag-application could happen through ‘matching.’ Put a couple files in the Lightbox, and then make all of them take on each others’ tags. (for example)

* The browsing ‘default view’ would be ’show all.’ So you’d have to have a way to, within a few clicks, get to the specific view you’re interested in. For example, click on a file and say “show me only ones files with at least these tags” or “show me files that have at least one of these tags”

And then the query could be built up visually in a ‘location bar’, where you can easily just double-click a particular ‘rule’ to banish it or whatever.

I think, for me, it’s basically a philosophy of “anything’s better than nothing.” So having zero organization, where my only browsing is by date is the current mechanism. Even if I could *just* tag ‘family’ pictures, that’s something I might do that would be helpful. But to *move* them out of their current by-date folders would already be violating the (simplistic) organization that’s been put in place.

Yeah.

It was funny that after I wrote all this conjecture, I started reading about [WinFS](http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Longhorn/WinFS/WinFSDataModel.asp), which may well include this sort of thing as a possibility.

But your premise seems to be, that because tags work well for collections of pictures, they should also work well with collections of files.

Well, I dispute your premise.

Like Zeldman, I don\’t like tags, either.

And OK, I\’ll admit at the outset that I\’ve never really tried using tags (I\’ve just briefly tried them with Picasa), so maybe I don\’t know what I\’m talking about. But here are some of my concerns.

But wait a second– tagging works because it\’s simple enough that people actually do it. It\’s straightforward. On the class website I administer, the photo gallery is an absolute disaster area because no one knows how to file anything or even where it should go

On my hard drive, the opposite is true.

For me, putting my photos into folders works (well, it sort of works) because it\’s simple enough that I actually do it. OTOH, tagging pictures is (or seems to me to be) so weird and unnatural, that I could never imagine doing it on a regular basis.

My photo uploading software forces me to put my pictures into a folder, each time I upload another batch of pictures, and my present system of hierarchical enforces a rudimentary kind of organization on the process.

Yes, folders have their drawbacks, particularly as you say because some pictures seem to belong in several places at once.

But if you abandon folders, in favour of using a tagging system, it seems to me that the cure is worse, much worse, than the disease.

With my folders, I won\’t always remember where I put a picture, and if I\’m away from my computer I will not even remember what my folder hierarchy is, but for me the big advantage is that I can * browse until I find what I\’m looking for*. Just a few clicks with Windows Explorer and I can see all of my photo folders, and if I\’m looking for a special picture I usually I can narrow it down to 2 or 3 folders where it\’s most likely to be, and in most cases, in under a minute, I\’ll have found it.

But with a tagging system, I presume that you an ONLY do searches, you give up that ability to browse, don\’t you?

So I would have to start constructing a search string:

Joel + (tree fort or island or camping or holiday) not 2003 not 2004

and then see what gets dredged up by the search. But if I had tagged my lovely picture \”tree house\” instead of \”tree fort\”, and \”Kids\” not \”Joel\” (because Virginia was also in the picture), then I might waste a lot of time fiddling with my search parameters and still I might never find the picture I\’m looking for.

With a folder system, you can be confident that (as long as you haven\’t deleted the file) the picture is somewhere on your hard drive. If you keep looking, you\’ll eventually find it. But with a tagging system, the picture might truly be \”nowhere\” on your computer, if you were in a hurry the day that you uploaded your camera so no tags got put on that batch of photos. Hence, it seems to me that the system only works if every single picture gets tagged, with meaningful tags, and if you maintain an rigourous system to enforce consistency (let\’s see, is she \”Nana\” or is she \”Grandma\”, is it \”Church\” or \”Rez\”, etc). Then I suppose you have to periodically retag your old photos if the tag system gets updated (eg, I might have 100\’s of pictures tagged as \”Michael\”, but now he goes by \”Mike\” so I need to change the old tags, etc) To me, it sounds like a nightmare system that requires a huge an ongoing investment of time.

Perhaps such a system would work well if the ‘explorer’ or tag-browsing application maintained some kind of index such that it could keep track of the more complicated relationships. The system is useless, of course, if you have to know the *exact* tags on a document in order to find it.

And ultimately, it would simply turn into another piece of data put to use by tools like [Spotlight](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/).

Move: would just add/remove tags associated with the file.

your current working directory is just the (ordered) list of tags that you need for things like ls, file creation and relative paths to work. It needs to be ordered so that you can use ../.. type constructs.

ls (or dir) would return you the files that match the current list of tags exactly.

creating a file would give the current list of tags.

This paradigm has the advantage of having docs/uni/calculus/project being the same as docs/project/uni/calculus

Anyhow, yeah, it was a great weekend, we need to hook up at the end of the summer.

tagging suits more the way a human organizes information (inside the brain..) well at least i think so