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Living Room / Re: How do you tag (or even organize) your files?

« on: December 03, 2007, 11:18 AM »

I did look at a few DB solutions (forgot to mention that) like AskSam and General, but again I found them either lacking in good portability features, and most importantly they were proprietary which I'm not a fan of for my knowledge. I prefer to keep my "system" as flexible as possible, and require the least work. The best solution I've seen to date is QuickSilver on OSX, a friend showed me his drag & drop tagging and filing capabilities, and my jaw hit the floor. Made me wish my work would let me use a Mac.

So PSTs are fairly open, and easy to organize. Its not ideal, I'd rather have a safe way to tag a file, and just leaving it lying in NFS, but aside from tagging in a name, there isn't a solution. Also the PST system is pretty damn fast to use. I use a GTD style of management for my life, and I can quickly tag a file Work (Blue)->Project (Olive)->Community (Yellow), and then associate with the GTD project I've got setup.

When I need to find the file, I've got a number of options: Look for anything Blue/Olive/Yellow, Filter on any of the 3 tags(categories), search via any DT app for the categories. I'm a visual driven guy, so for me color helps me quickly filter out noise. For example: In my File PST, there might be 100 Blue/Olive tagged files, but only the Yellow ones are related to community, and all of the Green, Red, etc are something else.

Color tagging along with text, for me, is far more powerful than straight text. Especially when I combine it with a GTD system and have all of my Next Actions/Contexts marked as bright Red, as soon as I see something tagged that way I know it is important and associated with something.

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Living Room / Re: How do you tag (or even organize) your files?

« on: November 29, 2007, 01:55 PM »

Wondering if anyone else has more thoughts on this topic?

I've been searching for a good solution for desktop tagging for awhile, but have yet to find a good one.

I've tried very app out there: Tag2Find, Tagg, UltraFolder, but have found them all lacking.

Tag2Find - Great interface, relatively easy to use. But, is tied locally (Current ver you can't have the DB on a network share, or even share the DB across systems); plus they've been saying they'll have v2 out now since Aug (Oct was target date) and there's very little activity on their forums anymore or updates.
Tagg - Ok interface, complex to use; Can have multiple tagging DBs, and can be stored remotely (nice). But, complex as heck to figure out, an requires a lot of clicks to do anything.
UltraFolder - Simple interface, snap to use. But, no network capabilities, and unlike the others likes to store the files in its own directory structure, instead of on your HD wherever you want.

So they all can do part of the job, but lack in critical areas (particularly portability) or have complex and inefficient UIs. They also all use proprietary DBs, so you can't search them with any DT search apps. I like cloud tags, but I also like simply typing in my DT search app and finding what I want there quickly and easily.

In the meantime I've tried using a system similar to Armando's system (specific names, tags in the file name itself) but this becomes cumbersome, and while using tags in Vista is nice (home PC) it is useless for my work laptio (XP) or any portability. All of the problems as well with Comments or Keywords on a file make thus highly problematic.

So in the meantime I'm considering one of two systems:
1) keep doing the file naming (possibly toss in the comments/tags aspect (short tag names)
2) Dumping all of my files (just PDFs, docs, xls, txt, ppts) into Outlook PSTs and using the same category approach I use to tag my emails (Outlook 07 categories are very nice). I'm limited to 2GB safe PSTs, though 07 now claims PSTs are safe to 20GBs. And separating my PSTs into Work (<2GB), Research (>4GB, but can be broken into logical chunks), Home (<2GBs).

The advantage to 2 is that I only have to create the tagging structure once, and get familiar w/ 1 methodology. Also its searchable and indexable via any DT search that can read PSTs. Its portable in that I can always transfer the PSTs to a key or external HD (or w/ my home server setup store them all on the server like I do, and access remotely). And relatively easy to extract from in the future. And it is very simple and easy to use (click away).

The 1st option roughly gives me the same capabilities as the 2nd..

And as for tagging in Outlook, I've tried all the Apps there as well, both specific (CategorieZ (current solution, though it does crash alot), & Taglocity) to IMS systems like ClearContext (like it, but its limited to 1 category only, and that's pointless with tags). The nice thing about tagging in Outlook is it can be both text driven (Idea) and visual (purple means Idea), which I haven't seen any other tagging product explore. No clouds though, but apps like CategorieZ and Taglocity can filter on tags in a folder, and using Outlooks's Advanced Find and set to Everything, you can search for Categories on anything. The downside is you can only search 1 PST at a time directly in Outlook. But w/ DT searching you can search anything.

I'm looking forward to v2 of Taglocity, which is supposed to be a lot nicer and easier to use. The fact that it doesn't integrate w/ Outlook's Categories is a deal breaker for me, that just limits the usefulness once again.