Any comments from the experts here?

The problem with this tagging method is when you update an application.

A related question: for PDF files, would it not be better to use the PDF keyword field (accessible via Preview) as the basis for tagging PDFs since these are embedded in the file and thus guaranteed to travel with the file across machines, operating systems etc.?

I know why my spotlight comments were being removed/lost. I was just pointing out that using spotlight comments for tagging really doesn’t work if they get lost when an application is updated.

I love the idea of tagging apps, I just wish there was a more permanent way of doing it.

I’m not an Apple engineer, but to the best of my knowledge, the Finder associates Spotlight Comments with the actual file, and not with the location of the file. Thus, when you move a file, its Spotlight Comments go with it. And that’s probably a good thing. :)

When you replace an existing file with another file, you are really deleting the original file and putting the new file in the same location with the same name. So because the Spotlight Comments are associated with the file, and not the location, and because you’re deleting the original and putting another in its place, the Spotlight Comments of the original file to the same place that the original file goes: they get deleted.

That’s why copying a new version of an application over an old version causes the Spotlight Comments you’d associated with the old version to go away. So yeah, that’s something to watch out for.

Hope this helps.

I have written XTagFS – a macfuse filesystem that allows you to view tags (i.e. spotlight comments) and tagged files as a file-system. In XTagFS, a tag becomes a folder which contains (alias/links to) files tagged with that tag. Files tagged with multiple tags can be accessed in any order: e.g. file tagged with tag1 and tag2 can be found at path /tag1/tag2 or tag2/tag1. Tagging/Untagging files and managing tags using file-system operations (mv, rm, etc) is planned for the next release.
You can get XTagFS from here: http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/

Please give it a shot – I would love to have some feedback/comments!

Thanks
ip

An Application on the Mac is really just a folder named {appname}.app right? Well, what happens when you copy a newer version of that app from a DMG file? Doesn’t it replace the folder that contains the tags with the one in the DMG file that doesn’t have tags?

If I were to go into the contents of the app in the DMG and copy all the files to the app on my HD, then I would expect the tags to stay since I’m not touching the folder that represents the application.

Am I missing something here? I’m still a bit new with Mac and OS X so its certainly possible.

Thanks for everyone’s input! For further questions or support, please email us at support_bot-at-bigrobotsoftware-dot-com.

And thanks to Nick for mentioning TagBot! He’s been a great source of interest and feedback.

The accent mark issue was recently brought to our attention, and we’ve been working on fixing it for an upcoming release of TagBot.

In the meantime, you should be able to delete the accented tag from any files you’ve applied it to by right-clicking on the file in the Finder, selecting Get Info, and deleting the tag text from the Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info window.

Sorry for the inconvenience; we’ll have a free upgrade with a fix for this issue released pretty soon.

I can’t remove them with QS nor Tagbot. Now I am stuck with a few tags that have accentmarks in them. No problem to add another tag without it, but I would like to find an easy way to delete the accented ones.

My advise for the moment: avoid accentmarks in your tags!

You need to copy the script into “Script Editor” and save it as “GetTags.scpt”

In GeekTool create a new entry with the command:
osascript /Users/username/path/to/script/GetTags.scpt

Hope this helps.