Tagging strategy on Mac OSX

Question

I want to use tagging on MacOSX, mostly for pictures, but may extend it to other files too. Caveat: it must be compatible with Leopard, because most of my files are on an old (pre-intel) iMac.

I have browsed, among the others: - http://www.gravityapps.com/tags/index.html - http://onflapp.wordpress.com/tagoman/ - http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/ - http://hasseg.org/tagger/ - http://www.ironicsoftware.com/tagit/

and I am currently testing tagit - mostly because it's free, and because I suppose that I am satisfied with the results I can move to some other (non-free) product by IronicSoftware.

Have anyone tried this already? Using what? Results? Caveats?

I also noticed that apparently tags placed by tagit do work with Spotlight, but are not recognized by NiftyBox (unless I need to do something special that I somehow missed in my brief test).

Is there any chance of interoperability among tagging products?

Answer 1

Tagit uses Open Meta while NiftyBox uses spotlight comments. You can still search for Tagit files in spotlight using the prefix "tag:". If you want NiftyBox to be able to see Tagit tags, you have to convert them to spotlight comments first. There doesn't seem to be an automated way of doing this, but you can use applescript to do the inverse.

Answer 2

According to this blog, any tags (or metadata) that works with Spotligt will work on Tiger and Leopard, and I assume also Snow Leopard.

I suggest you check if Finder and Spotlight can read any of the tags created by the different software packages you are using. If they can, chances are that other software packages can read it too. If they can't, I wouldn't use the software in question, as I would suspect attempted vendor lock-in ;-)

Cheers!