To Tag or Not to Tag: Punakea and SpotMeta

I have been so disappointed with Spotlight that I disable it on my Mac. Reading about these utilities has me reconsidering that decision.

If you invest heavily in tagging your files, be sure that you are using a backup method that preserves all metadata. There were some very imformitive articles on the PlasticsFurniture blog that pointed out that many utilities are lax where metadata is concerned. You can read more here:

http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/

SuperDuper was the only utility that really saved everything.

SpotMeta being fully integrated into Spotlight, the tags created using SpotMeta may be used for search criteria in HoudahSpot (http://www.houdahspot.com). I guess I should some day blog about the workflow of filing, cataloging and retrieving such created.

Full disclosure: I'm a 64-YO old fuddy duddy who's been working as a *user* of computers since the late 1960s; been a happy Mac user since 1985.

So here hardly a day goes by when I don't see something here or on other Mac blogs or in Version Tracker alluding to "tags" and "tagging." I'm having a hard time learning about what tags are and why they'd be useful for me.

From what I can tell, tagging seems to be a means of adding "metadata" to files and folders, data that more completely describe the contents of the file than a simple filename or the folder hierarchy. So far, so good, right?

So a couple of years ago I bought and started using an app called Shoebox where I could go through thousands of digital images and tag them with all sorts of expressive tags. The trouble is, I got through perhaps 150 before my eyes crossed and my typing fingers got tired.

So now tagging is becoming more pervasive it seems, and I think that tagging is a good addition to anyone's box of utilities. However, the thing that bothers me is the time needed initially to rummage through perhaps tens of thousands of files and folders and create meaningful tags for them. So is there some way of easing this burden? I don't particularly want to spend a good percentage of my remaining years (though I'll live to 90) tagging, for gosh sakes.

By the way, the article and followup comments were quite interesting. thanks, folks.

-Tod

If you're interested in more than filing your stuff away, check out SpotlightFS, developed for MacFUSE. It's an extension of Apple's Smart Folders, in that it will show any smart folders in ~/Library/Saved Searches/ but you can actually have them mounted and use them from the terminal, as well as browse new folders and spotlight results will show up dynamically. It's interesting, but I haven't really found it very useful myself yet. I guess it's a hint at what Apple could do in the future, if tagging is integrated into the OS.

What I'm mainly using Punakea for, is clearing my desktop. I don't think it's the best, but it works and it's fast.

Now all I want to set up some sort of alert that will tell me when one of my tags reaches 4.4 GB so I can burn a DVD archive.

Tagging in the finder takes up too much time and requires too much thought.

In the hopes of re-clarifying something about Spotmeta: there's not real limit on tags, as far as I can tell. You can make up as many tags on the fly as you want; you're not constrained to using a controlled vocabulary at all.

I should probably tell you what it does! The script puts a spotlight comment on each file in your document folder's subfolders based on each parent folder's name up to the document folder. So for every file in ~/Documents/School/Fall 2006/English, each will be giving the comment English Fall 2006 School. The script won't overwrite existing comments (hopefully), and shows a progress dialog.

Reading this post reminded me of my unfinished project to convert my hierarchal documents folder to a spotlight comments based documents folder. I dusted off my incomplete Applescript and finished it. If anyone finds this useful, pass it on! http://www.freewebtown.com/pianomansam/Folders2Tags-1.0.scpt

It would be nice if Leopard (or some other application) would make tagging in Finder as easy at it is with the use of Ken Ferry's "Keyword Assistant" in iPhoto.

Personally I'm far more comfortable with a hierarchical system -- it just seems more natural and less cluttered to me.

Of course, that assumes you don't have a large number of things that belong in multiple places (tricky in a hierarchical system, but not so bad in finder (for example) with smart folders, etc).