I think we’ve covered a lot of ground in the past 4 weeks, talking about Metadata in OS X. While it’s clearly a large step in a new direction, attacking that new way of thinking can really pay dividends as you hone that system to your own needs. In this wrap-up post about Metadata, I’ll share some of the ideas I’m trying to work out, which may even take tagging to the next level of usefulness.
But before we dig into my dark and twisted mind, I wanted to address a question that has come up a couple times in the past weeks. I’m excited to finally be able to share the details behind the robot icon in my menubar. As some of you have surely guessed, it’s from BigRobotSoftware, who have in the past offered Meta, which is a somewhat enhanced Spotlight application. Well as of today you can check out their newest offering, TagBot. I’ll cover it in a little more detail soon, but here’s the quick and dirty:
Drag and drop files onto a window of tags (automatically prepended with the &) for simple tagging of single or multiple files. Double click the tags for an instant Spotlight search window. Or better still, add tags to files (or search for similarly tagged files) via a right click contextual menu item. It’s no frills and works really well. It’s a handy little application on its own, but even moreso if you’re not a Quicksilver user, but want to easily tag your files. The guys at BRS have let me test drive it for a while, and I highly recommend giving it a look.
The Future of Tagging
So you’re getting into the habit of tagging your files and searching for them via Spotlight or Quicksilver. Where do we take it from here?
I’m optimistic that Leopard will heavily integrate tagging into the operating system interfaces. I have a hard time believing that the smart people at Apple would continue to overlook this most awesome feature. Should they be releasing added functionality, I’d love to see the ability for programmers to hook into the metadata functions of the OS for more universal use of the tags. For instance, it would be killer to have non-proprietary tagging available within iView Media Pro. (I realize it’s Microsoft owned now, and not likely to happen, but you get the idea.) Hopefully we’ll know more about Leopard soon!
But how can we take tagging to the next level now? I’ve been tinkering with an idea for a while now, that I think would really make the use of tagging files absolutely blow up. Picture this:
As you create files on your hard drive, tag them, and edit them, a Folder Action (or something of the like) is intently ‘watching’ in the background. A rule (based probably on some fancy Apple Scripting) would evaluate to determine if there were 5 or more files with a matching tag, that had been opened or modified in the past week. Those files would then cause a Smart Folder to be generated on the Desktop, as they’re clearly files that are important in the here and now. Should the date in which those files were last touched slip out of the last 5 day range, the Smart Folder disappears from the Desktop, assuming you’re no longer in need of them.
Basically, if I’m putting in the time to tag my files appropriately, I’d like the OS to do the rest of the thinking for me. Show me what’s relevant to me now and leave the rest of the stuff where it’s at for whenever I decide to go ‘digging’ for it. I think that with some tricky Apple Script-fu, this could be a reality. However I’m not currently the one to produce it.
Possible Solutions
But as I’ve tried different approaches to making a system like this a reality, I’ve exhausted Automator’s limits (or rather, my knowledge of Automator’s abilities). But I think recently I’ve come up with a decent alternative. It’s not the full system I’ve imagined, but a good compromise, should it pan out as I hope.
Hazel sort of acts as a Folder Action, but gives a lot more flexibility to the user (especially if they’re Apple Script challenged, such as I am). There is still a little fore-though required, which means it’s not as automatic and dynamic as I’d like, but it may suffice for the time being… But the setup – for use with Hazel – would go something like so:
Create a Smart Folder looking for the Spotlight Comment &now and save it to the Desktop. Then create a rule for each tag that you plan to use frequently. Each of those rules would additionally look for an opened/modified date of the past 5 days.
This would effectively put your recently important files of specific tags right at your fingertips on the desktop. Of course you’d still need to remove the &now tag from the file once it’s no longer immediately important, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m still playing with different rules in Hazel to see what may work the best. But the ability to attach Apple and Shell Scripts to your Hazel rules is something that I really like, and hope to leverage moving forward along these lines.
If you’ve got some snazzy Apple Script skills – or other ideas you think may be useful to this vision – I’d love to hear your thoughts!
What Else?
In The Apple Blog Community, one super smart user had the idea of using GeekTool to keep track of his tags generated from within Quicksilver. The tags are stored in an XML file which can have a shell script run against it, and then displayed on your desktop via GeekTool. This way you can quickly and easily keep track of your tags, should the listing get to be more than you can handle without assistance.
I’m sure there are more excellent ideas out there for leveraging Metadata and the wonderful tools available to us on the OS X platform (both baked-in and shareware), and would love to hear any other wild and crazy thoughts you may have on the subject. Please share these, and any other comments below!
And in the meantime, just try to think in a more meta state of mind. Don’t let the history of folder hierarchy keep you confined to such a limited approach to storing your files – there’s much more flexibility at your finger tips than you may realize. Force yourself into the habit of tagging and searching on those tags. Couple this new approach with regular foldering techniques and you may soon find an efficient equilibrium that should make you more productive than ever before.
If you enjoyed this series of articles, let us know! It’s been a lot of work putting them together, but also a lot of fun. If there are specific topics you’d like to see covered in this same detail over a period of time, share with us and we’ll do our best to bring it to you.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating TagBot and Pete from BigRobotSoftware was kind enough to alert me to its availibility early this morning. I’ve been playing around with it for the better part of the morning and it definitely blows the roof off of other tagging methods. The ability to look at the pool of your tags definitely keeps me more organized and does away with problem duplicate tags such as “apps” v “app” etc. The interface is quite elegant and the ability to drag & drop files for tagging is a nice option to have. I’ve been using Quicksilver to tag my files for several months and TagBot will definitely replace QS in that regard. One last note; TagBot prepends tags with the ampersand in the same fashion as I had set up in QS which makes the transition seamless.
I kind of posted this in the screencast thread, but you may not have seen it, or had an answer…
Basically how do you deal with tags that have a lot of files associated, say 100+, in the folder hierarchy world you can make subfolders, but I haven’t found a way to make “sub-tags”, or I guess more to the point use multiple tags to find a file. Is there anyway to do this, or even a related tag feature?
Maybe I’ve missed it in an earlier screencast, but is there a way to bulk delete all Spotlight comments from a group of items? I’d like to rework the way I use metadata and want to start from a clean slate. Google turns up nothing and I’ve tried creating a workflow in Automator using the “Add Spotlight Comments” action and replacing rather than appending a single space, but that doesn’t work either.
Chris:
I’m not sure that you’re asking your question with regard to TagBot, or with regard to Quicksilver’s tagging functionality, but I’ll just throw this out there either way…
I think what you want to do is to apply multiple tags to your files. So if, say, you were organizing a bunch of photos, you might apply a tag called “vacation” to all your photos that came from any vacation. Then you’d apply a tag called “Paris” to any photos from Paris, regardless of whether they’re from your vacation or not.
Then, when you want to find your Paris vacation photos, you’d select the “Paris” tag and the “vacation” tag in TagBot, then hold shift while double-clicking them. When you do this, TagBot will find for you all the photos you’ve tagged with “Paris” and “vacation”.
The effect is similar to if you’d had a folder called “vacation”, and it contained a sub-folder called “Paris”, and you kept your Paris vacation photos in there. But the thing is, tagging is a much more flexible way to organize, because what if you also want to organize based on the year in which your photos were taken? Would you keep your “Paris” folder inside your “2006″ folder? What if you wen to Paris in 2006 and 2004? Sure, you can just keep two folders called “Paris”, one in each year, but that can get to be a hassle if you want to find all your Paris photos, regardless of the year.
If you’re using tagging to organize, you just tag your 2006 photos with the “2006″ tag, and the 2004 photos with the “2004″ tag. Then if you want to see your Paris photos from 2004, you ask TagBot to show you files with the “2004″ and “Paris” tags. And if you want to see all your Paris photos, you just ask TagBot to show you all files with the “Paris” tag.
To summarize, I think your best bet is to apply multiple tags to your files in cases when you’d be putting your files into sub-folders if you were organizing by folder. I’m sure this system would work with Quicksilver as well as it would with TagBot, but TagBot makes it pretty easy to see all your tags and select the set of tags you want to access.
Hope this helps!
I guess it was more of an “in general” question. I understood multiple tags, but other than creating a smart folder and specifying multiple comments, I couldn’t come up with a quick way of nailing it down farther. I’ll try TagBot out, that sounds like exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
Hi again Chris,
If you have a copy of Meta, you can use it to edit Spotlight comments for multiple files at the same time. Just select the files you want to clear Spotlight comments from in the Meta search results pane, then right-click and select “Edit Spotlight Comments”. Once the Spotlight Comments window pops up, you can clear the comment field and click OK.
I’ve really enjoyed all your metadata posts. They’ve been really informative & have made me get into tagging in a big way.
You ideas sound great. I hope someone with more brains than me can get it up & running.
TagBot looks good, kinda similar to Punakea. Looks like both have their plus & minus points points:
I really like the context menu plugin for TagBot but it looks like it should have an ‘Add New Tag’ option.
I like the fact that it uses the ‘&’ prefix rather than Punakea using it’s own tagging characters method (although you’ll be able to choose in the future).
I like the way in Punakea that you can drag a tag off the tagging window & it’ll create a smart folder on the desktop. I think that feature would be welcome in TagBot (I found a sort of way of doing with this with the smart searches brought up with Quicksilver. If you click on the smart folder icon in the title bar (next to the name of the tag) & drag it onto the desktop it creates a smart folder for the search).
Would be nice if you you dock the tag palette to the edge of the screen & show/autohide it when needed (a la Punakea).
Thanks again for the series!
Hi Jono,
It’s not very obvious, but in TagBot you can save a tag or set of tags as a Smart Folder by right-clicking on the tag(s), then selecting Save As Smart Folder. But the other stuff you suggest sounds interesting. :)
“In The Apple Blog Community, one super smart user had the idea of using GeekTool to keep track of his tags generated from within Quicksilver.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but thanks.
Wowee Zowee!
This is sweetness indeed. Especially the ‘hidden’ feature you pointed out in the comments up there for ‘AND’ searching by shift clicking.
OK. I have been using the ‘@’ to perpend, and my QS tags all use this. I want to go over the ampersand now. Any idea on how to do this? I could do it manually without too much hardship, I guess, but it’ll take an age as I have 124 tags set in QS.
Still and all, TagBot looks like a keeper. I’ll give it a few days but I can see 20 bucks winging it’s way to you pretty soon.