if I tag file for some project from my notebook, does the tags appear on the other client machine?

I saw the question about mailtag, can they be searched by qs as well?

what about address book contacts, can I tag these too?

What happen if some file has been download to a remote computer via ftp and then uploaded back again? they will keep tags?

Thank you very much

With the help of some clever implementers on my project, we’ve implemented folder emulation — using tags! If each item is tagged with its path+shortName, then all the paths form a hierarchical set of tags (either break out the path components or keep them in one string, it’s an implementation choice).

So if I want to say “this thing should be in the same conceptual space as these other things” and I am used to having a nice hierarchical set of concept spaces (read: folders), I can still order/organize things in that way, and people can still find them in that way. It makes it obvious that folders are just another tagging system.

But being able to ALSO tag them and put them into various views, using their tags, is really nice so far. (Will release new web site Real Soon Now.) It has taken a lot of time to come up with a satisfactory set of taxonomies, though.

On my Mac, with over 1M files, and maybe 100K emails, I am not about to start tagging them all — I’m happier using sorts and searches, and memory. But I’ll view the movie (as soon as my system lets me), maybe I’ll change my mind.

I noticed when using (the older version) that for some reason Quicksilver & TagBot saved searches wouldn’t always pick up files tagged using Default Folder X. Sometimes it would add a space & I’d have to ‘Get Info’ on the file & remove the space it added before the tag in order for it to play nice with other tagging apps.

Any word on it this has been fixed?

- Jon

- Jon

thx

I’ve got a project, called ZODAS, it has around 100 files (give or take), so I’ve tagged all of those as zodas, then some as zodas & module, etc. My problem is that now I get a list of 100+ files when I do a show files matching, is there anyway to specify more than one tag in qs? Or possibly get it to list the other matching tags at the top of the list of files?

Has anyone looked into Spotmeta? It looks like a great app, the problem I have though is it won’t play with QS. I can find the tags with spotlight but not QS.

As always, great screencast, thank you.

http://www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta/

Thanks for the screencast. Now to the brave New World of tagging.

I hate that. Could you go back to the old days where you could downlaod the QT file?

Thanks

I figured out why.

It doesn’t like the ‘&’ before the tag, I believe. I have some tags on my computer that I don’t know where they came from. They’re just normal words, and I clicked on one by accident, and it opened a Spotlight search window, with it searching Spotlight comments with that tag.

Just thought you guys would like to know that.

Joshua
What I’ve opted to do is tag files AND keep them arranged in folders. I have a client’s work folder well arranged & don’t really like the thought of throwing everything in 1 folder. But do like the idea of tagging files so they are easy to quickly bring up in spotlight or a smart folder from Quicksilver or Punakea.

In the client’s work folder at the moment I have 272 clients. Then in each folder there’ll be a ‘project1′ folder, a ‘project2′ folder etc. So (almost) all files in the project1 folder would be tagged ‘&clientname.project1′, ‘&clientname.project2′, ‘&clientname.project3′ etc.
Those files that I know I won’t need to hand quickly all the time I don’t tag & can still find them in the organised folders if ever needed.

Andy
It’s possible to set up a trigger that once you’ve selected the files in Finder you can tag with one step. I set up a tagging trigger ‘Finder Selection, TAB, Add Tags’ & bound it to a hot key (CTRL, Option +T).

clsnyder
This is easy enough with Quicksilver. Select all files in a folder, hit CTRL, Shift+T (or whatever you set up for your trigger) & type singapore ants (Quicksilver will add the prefix so in Spotlight comments it would be ‘&singapore &ants’).
It won’t tag files in subfolders (but in column view it pretty quick to select files in a folder, tag them, move to the next folder, tag them etc.) Or like Daniel H says you could set up an Automator workflow.

try installing the Spotlight plugin, and the extra scripts plugin. I believe both will help in this. (I’ve found that making sure the scripts are marked in the Catalog/Scripts area is a safe bet too)

I’ll be preparing a longer response to the rest of the questions thus far - most likely in a full blog post tomorrow.

Activate QS, type “tag,” hit enter to “show entry in catalog.”

As soon as the pref window comes up, you can close it. Now you should be able to right-arrow into your individual tags. I find I have to do this every time I resart QS. I think it’s just a matter of re-indexing the files.

Good luck.

Apparently, you can do it in one step by pressing command-escape, but this only works with certain applications. For example, it works in Finder, but it does not work with Path Finder (which I use for file management).

On a different note, I have another question for Nick and I do not remember this being covered in the screencast. How can you tag with words that have spaces? I am sure you can do that in Default Folder X, because you manually prepend each tag. However, how can you tag this way in Quicksilver? For example, if I wanted for a tag to be “civil procedure”, Quicksilver prepends both of the words with & and makes them into 2 different tags.

Basically, when I click on the file and then use my Quicksilver hotkey, I get a blank Quicksilver box. Is there a preference that I do not have enabled which is causing this?

This isn’t done using the regular quicksilver shortcut (cmd+space or whatever you have it set to. It’s actually a trigger in quicksilver to bring whatever you’ve highlighted into quicksilver. Mine is set up as cmd+g. You can set it in the QS preferences in Triggers-Quicksilver-Command Window with selection. Also, make sure in preferences-extras that you have Pull selection from front application instead of Finder ticked.

Andy: The way I bring the selected file into the first QS pane is by command-G. But it does like there is a setting somewhere to do it automatically.

First of all, I’m not certain of the best way to go about tagging all of my existing files. I saw suggestions from the previous post to use a script that would embed the file’s folder name as the tag. But I’m not sure this is the most effective approach. Is there a better way?

Also, I’m uncertain about handling nomenclature. What naming conventions work in a way that is clear, consistent, meaningful, and memorable?

And this leads to another uncertainty. How to manage all those tags? For example, what if I find that a particular tagging approach isn’t working for me (e.g. too many inconsistencies in use). I decide I want to re-tag all the associated files using some new convention. Quicksilver doesn’t quite seem appropriate on a large scale and other applications, such as Punakea, operate too much outside the operating system for my taste.

Perhaps the greatest thing holding me back is the conceptual leap. I can see advantages and disadvantages in folder hierarchies and tags. As mentioned by others, with folders, a file can exist in only one place even though categorically it may fall into many different areas. But then, a folder hierarchy is like a mind map. If I am uncertain of a file’s location, often I can find it by following the folder tree as if it were a line of thought frozen in time. But in that, perhaps it is too rigid. Yet it seems that because tags are so free form and independent, they lack the semantic relationship inherent to the nested structure of a folder hierarchy. Or is that relationship actually not so important and we’ve just been trained to think it is?

I’d be curious to hear thoughts on this, particularly regarding the conceptual shift and whether tagging really does make it easier to find something you know you have, but just can’t remember how to get hold of.