Comments field: useful or useless?

I'd like to thank all the 'list view' folks for weighing in. :) I wonder if there is a hidden pocket of 'icon view' folks who feel slighted by this whole discussion! Michael - thanks for the tip on Big Cat. Can't wait to dive in on that one. Not only do I want more from the comments field, but I want yet another field, a keywords field, that would let me 'tag' files with categories on the fly, a la Flickr and del.icio.us. Then I want to be able to get a list of all files/folders tagged with a specific category. Mostly I'm frustrated with the traditional file system hierarchy, which forces you to categorize files/folders in a single structure when truly, all of my data needs to be organized in multiple ways that change over time. I'm dreaming that Tiger/Spotlight is going to be the paradigm shift I'm looking for.

I use list view most of the time, and I really don't like column view much at all. But, please, no tooltips for comments. I hate tooltips with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns, and really, strongly wish for a way to permanently shut them off systemwide so that no application can ever toss one of the idiotic things in my face ever again, ever.

The primary issue with using the comments field for my purposes is that you can only edit for one item at a time. You can label as many simultaneously as you want, but comments - no dice!

Useless unless you're passing a file back and forth between people.

I do use list view most of the time. Just never got into the habit of using column view.... I use AppleScript via Big Cat to set and read comments by right-clicking. I also use AppleScript to link two files in separate locations by putting each one's file URI into the other's comments field--that way any two files can also function as aliases to each other. If anyone's interested, the get/set comments scripts are here: and the link files scripts are here: .

I do use list view most of the time. Just never got into the habit of using column view.... I use AppleScript via Big Cat to set and read comments by right-clicking. I also use AppleScript to link two files in separate locations by putting each one's file URI into the other's comments field--that way any two files can also function as aliases to each other. If anyone's interested, the get/set comments scripts are here: and the link files scripts are here: .

I use list view 99% of the time :P Old habits die hard I guess, but I find listing files by the modified date to be usually what I want. PS Great idea about the tool-tip.

More imoprtantly, the rich file metadata is not reliable, as it is easy to lose, e.g. when sending a file by email or uploading it to a FTP server. On pre-OS X Mac OS, you would also lose it if you had to rebuild the desktop, something that happened more often than you would think.

Download Comment: http://www.ecamm.com/mac/free/ Puts the URL of a downloaded file in the Comments field. And Spotlight can search comments, so you can use it to find all files downloaded from a site. There are also a number of iTunes scripts that use the Comments field of the MP3 file for temp data storage.