Where to find a tag based file manager?

Question

I'm a CS uni student in a country with limited bandwidth, and I find that I download files (particularly install files) for reuse\reinstallation\giving to my friends.. I've kept these files in different folders, and now find it extremely hard to find them, and keeping track of obselete files (the almost weekly releases of iTunes versions, or latest 7zip release or the .Net framework installers). What I would like to find is a file manager that could support tags, so instead of hierachical folders, i could find\view files according to their tags...

Answer 1

I suggest TaggedFrog too. It's the only and the best tagged file explorer.

Answer 2

I also found the following software:

http://tabbles.net/

It is a bit tricky to use, but the approach is very interesting!

Answer 3

You already can do this for some file types. For example, in Windows Vista/7 search tag:sometag will find photos tagged for that. Similarly, artist/album info is indexed for music files.

Now for general files, there is the Windows property system which is a sort of taxonomic structure you might be looking for. Windows Desktop Search doesn't index NTFS alternate data streams (as other answers have suggested), but the solution would be to write a property handler that could be installed for all file types, which could access the ADS and extract your custom tags and report them to WDS. I don't know of such a utility, however, and a discussion of implementation details would be a question for StackOverflow, not SuperUser.

Answer 4

One really cool solution for Linux and OS X: http://www.pytagsfs.org/

"pytagsfs is a FUSE filesystem that arranges media files in a virtual directory structure based on the file tags. For instance, a set of audio files could be mapped to a new directory structure organizing them hierarchically by album, genre, release date, etc. File tags can be changed by moving and renaming virtual files and directories. The virtual files can also be modified directly, and, of course, can be opened and played just like regular files."

Answer 5

TagsForAll might be able to do this.

This application provides a more advanced way for managing your files based on tags/keywords.

An excellent solution for streamlining the access to images, documents, photos, books, multimedia content, and so on.

• The advantage of organizing files via tags\keywords is having a more flexible way of searching among similar files by using criteria that are less precise and more intuitive than the full path.

• Several plugins included in this version of program make begin of work with it more friendly and simple.

• You don’t even have to launch TagsForAll each time manually—just right-click a folder or file in Explorer, and then select “Manage Tags” in the context menu.

Answer 6

Maybe, you could write your tags into an Alternate Data Stream and search for them with streams.exe.

I have never used this technique nor streams.exe, so take it as a suggestion.

Regars, Rene

Answer 7

Try using a search interface, rather than a file manager, to find your files.

As mentioned by someone else, Spotlight on the MAC can sort things by tags.

For many platforms, Beagle Search provides some metadata (i.e., tag) based searching.

Answer 8

Rather than focusing on a meta-data based/tag based file manager, please consider desktop search to meet your needs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5Fsearch%5Fengines#Desktop%5Fsearch%5Fengines

I have used X1 Desktop Search and have been very pleased with the results. Unlike Google Desktop Search, X1 provides some filtering of results by column.

Answer 9

Take a look at new Reggata project I am involved with. Maybe you'll find it interesting.

Answer 10

I use Directory Opus and it supports tags very well. You can tag everything, including folders and text files.

Answer 11

Check out This link. It has summaries on 5 good file managers. Some of them are tab based.

Answer 12

You've got it right: tags are a very powerful way to structure data.

But you are complicating things.

Personally I just create simple text files called tags in directories. These files contain a couple of suggestive keywords that describe the content of the directory. When I need to search for something, I search in tag files only.

Answer 13

Its a synchronisation tool but syncless might be what you're looking for

Answer 14

I tried to roll my own a bit back HERE, as I was very interested in this.

In the process, I came across Tagsistant and Oyepa. I consider both of those to be the best results of my searching, and I lean far more toward Oyepa for the simple reason that it isn't doing anything in a database. It actually changes the names of your files to contain tags. This might bother some, but I think it's fantastic, and it also ensures that if you every get rid of the program or change OSs, you'll still be able to search by the tags. For work, I was going to go with:

,---
| proj_name-of-file_yyyy-mm-dd_[tag1-tag2-tag3].ext
`---

This way, I had handles on all aspects: the project code, name, date, and any tags. Even without finding a literal tag-based FS, you can use some of the recommendations here for various search tools to find your files based on the tags. Honestly, I think uniform naming schemes would help a lot of users clear up some of the issues that have them hunting for memory/disk-space heavy search applications in the first p