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Way back in the days when "delicious" was just "del.icio.us", I had assumed that everyone had finally caught on that Ontology is overrated.

I can tag on-line web links, blog posts, questions on stackoverflow.com, and all kinds of web-centric miscellany, but this very basic concept still seems to be missing (or hideously crippled) in Windows?

If you use "tagging" for your local files, what do you use?

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I don't use tagging. I use search. A good search engine built right into Windows since Vista, and it has rarely failed me.

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That makes sense, but how do you search when the content is mp3 files or images? Tagging allows you to actually attach descriptions to non-editable files. – dreftymac Jul 22 at 17:28
@dreftymac: Cygwin: find /path/to/base/dir -type f -name *.mp3 | grep fileNameRegEx; or create a index of mp3 files with locate32.exe. – nik Jul 22 at 17:37
Problem is when you start to get a thousand hits, because you couldn't narrow down that nice query of yours... But then most often it works just fine – Ivo♦ Jul 22 at 19:15
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  1. Vista has some support - Tag files and save searches in Windows Vista
  2. TaggedFrog for XP - Add tags to files in Windows XP using TaggedFrog
  3. Tagging files in Windows XP (and why you’ll ditch Google Desktop)

Interestingly, none of these are my methods.
I use locate32.exe if I have to find files.
Gave up on windows indexing a long time back.
I might even do a Cygwin, bash, find and even grep to get a file.

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+1 on cygwin and bash ... they are painful to use on windows, but a lot less painful than not having them at all – dreftymac Jul 22 at 17:37

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