On the web, we’ve been tagging everything for at least a couple of years now.

We tag bookmarks, photos, applications, blog posts, and on and on and on. I’ve written at length about streamlined ways to tag files within OS X, and lauded the fantastic Default Folder X from St Clair Software for their efforts to make ‘tagging’ more accessible at the save screen. But still, we have yet to see any advances from Apple at the operating system level.

I was hoping against hope this time last year, that when I got Leopard (10.5) home and installed, I’d find some new ‘keyword’, or tagging support across the operating system. But obviously that dream came and went. With speculation that the next OS X iteration will be more or less hardening the system, and maintenance type enhancements, it doesn’t seem prudent to hold my breath for that release now, either.

I suppose the tried and true way of doing things (hierarchical folders housing documents that you have to drill-down to find) continues to reign supreme. Is tagging at the operating system level just too ambiguous for users to grasp? My feeling is that if it were made more accessible, a definite change would begin to occur in the way people accessed their hard-drive-based files. But I’ve been known to talk all wild and crazy before.

So riddle me this — Do you think tagging has a place at the operating system level? Clearly it has found a home on the web, but is it really suitable for use on a computer operating system with a myriad of files and file types? I’ve found use out of such a setup, but is the ‘old school’ way of doing things still best, and should it be left un-touched? Let’s hear your thoughts, as I’m really curious as to why the tagging methodology would sing on the web, but not on our own computer systems.

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I rebooted my Macbook Pro about four days ago, and lo, to my surprise, the icon for my boot drive had vanished. I was, too say the least, slightly perturbed. (To the right, the culprit.)

I tried all the quick-fix things – changed what showed in Finder, tried to get it back through Finder – it was gone there too – and finally, I sucked it up and called Apple. Three calls to Apple – and two instances of being hung up on – a clean install of Leopard, and multitudinous Google searches later, I had found two things: a lot of other people were having these issues, all starting about the same time as mine, and, more importantly, a solution.

So first, the solution, and then the explanation of what it is, what it does, and what that means for all of us Mac users.

To get your startup drive back, you need to run two Terminal commands. One of them requires that you have an Administrator password. I’d generally try to give you a solution that didn’t require Terminal, given some peoples’ squishiness about that, but I can’t find another frontend to this. (There’s an Applescript running around, but it doesn’t work, really.)

First, run xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment /***

In this case the *** signifies the name of your missing drive, as this command will work for any drive. If you want your startup drive, all you need is the slash.

Next, run sudo chflags nohidden /*** Same deal with the asterisks, though in this case, another important modification is that it doesn’t need to be run as sudo unless you’re running it on your root drive.

Log out and/or restart, and your icon should be back to stay.

Now, what that all means. As it turns out, the culprit in all this is a simple metadata flag, the hidden flag. This is the same flag that hides the .DS_store files and other things that you’d rather not see floating about your operating system all the time. The problem, in this case, is a change in how Leopard handles that flag, and metadata in general.

Leopard marks a very interesting shift in how Apple’s chosen to deal with the increasing amounts of complicated metadata that we’re all generating. In past years, this has been stored in .DS_store files, for the most part. Tiger added the xattr function family and API’s to play with some, and some people, namely Marquis Logan and John Siracusa, then wrote up some nice little tools that made this accessible to all of us.

In Leopard, there is now a native command for this. There are four flags to the xattr command, at least so far as I’ve been able to tell. (There is no man page for this, but -h works.) They are -l, -p, -w, and -d, and all of them are written out as xattr -flag file [file path]. -L lists the names of all extended attributes on the file. -P, used with -l, prints them. -W is written out as xattr -w attribute_name attribute_value file [file path], and changes the chosen value to whatever you specify. -D, the important one for the above command, simply deletes all extended attributes. The first command, then, deletes all the extended attributes on the given file. The com.apple.metadata.kMDItemFinderComment contains, among other things, the flags for drives in Finder.

The second command, the chflags command, resets the hidden flag on the given file. Two different methods of getting at two different types of metadata, in essence. The second command is found in a couple of places if you google this, but it by itself doesn’t keep the job done. Without the xattr command, the hidden flag resets every time Finder does.

Now, how this happens? I don’t know. I’m working on that – but I suspect that Apple may be too. And in the meantime, I’ve already found some neat things people are doing with it now. Anyone for a way to kill that annoying ‘this program has been downloaded from the internet’ message?

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Apple offers the means to get your tag on within OS X, no third party apps required. The trick however is making it viable to use on a regular basis. To do this, I highly recommend 2 pieces of software to help you on your way to tagging-bliss:

Default Folder X
The most logical point in time to add a tag to a file’s metadata is when you save it. DFX gives you that ability, which is so much more intuitive than having to locate the file after the fact, and append its Spotlight Comments. One better, is that DFX will even remember your recent tags so you can select them from a drop down rather than retyping, and potentially creating a one-off rather than adding to a single list of tags. (This last comment gets much more into the methodology that I cover in depth, here.) DFX does a lot of other cool and useful stuff too, but that’s outside the scope of this commentary.

TagBot
In this internet age, it’s entirely possible that you’re downloading more files than you’re creating, so DFX’s at-save-time capabilities don’t help quite as much. Enter TagBot. A quick access palette interface makes it easy to drag/drop files onto the tags you wish to apply to your file’s metadata. Better yet, is the ability to see at a glance, how many files are associated with any given tag. Double-clicking a tag brings up a Smart Search window showing you all your like-tagged files, wherever they reside on your system. A quick screencast demo can be found here.

So while Apple will get you there, they don’t currently make it all that easy. (My fingers are crossed that they fix this in Leopard.) For now though, these couple tools can propel you easily into a solid practice of tagging your files for quick and convenient access and storage.

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This update will likely be most lauded for playing well with the latest Leopard builds. Also of note is the auto-completion of Spotlight Comments as they’re being entered. A host of bug fixes comes along with this 3.0.5 update as well.

This is a free upgrade to all users with a license from January 1, 2006 and newer. It will set you back $14.95 for a spanking new license of your very own.

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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.

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I will continue to update this post with answers to questions from that post.

#4 – Finding Untagged Files
Afraid you’re going to have to get creative on that one. Right now there’s no clear cut way to search on an empty Spotlight Comments window. You could probably get tricky with custom raw queries, but I haven’t gone that far yet.

#5 – Tag Catalog isn’t alphabetized
When you arrow into the tag catalog, you should be seeing a dropped-down list of tags. The header of this list reads, “Browsing”. If you follow that header to the right, there’s an icon of a gear – if you click that gear, choose ‘Sort By Name’. Boom!

And yes, it appears to be video artifacts. I have some custom colors and the glass effect setup in the Quicksilver UI, but otherwise it’s just the video reproduction.

#6 – Quicksilver Tagging Not Showing in Get Info
So are the tags searchable in Spotlight? Could it be that the Spotlight Comments part of the GUI just isn’t updating properly or something? I haven’t seen that before, but I’d check to see if your tags are returning the proper files in Spotlight.

#7 – Robot Icon in Menubar
Sorry Eric, can’t talk about that quite yet. But It’s cool, and I can’t wait to let the bot out of the bag…

#8 – Unable to Arrow Into Tags
I can’t be sure on this one. The first thing I’d suggest would be to make sure you’ve installed the Spotlight plugin for Quicksilver. Also check that the Extra Scripts plugin is installed (and selected in the catalogs area). Hopefully one or both of those things helps.

#9 – Bringing Files Into Quicksilver
It’s already been answered in a few of the comments, but you can also check out a screencast I did on the topic here…which also contains screen shots on setting up a trigger to do the same thing no matter what application your selection is in.

#11 – What’s The Terminal Icon in the Menubar?
I seem to get this question every screencast. It’s called Visor, and it’s made by the same people who brought us Quicksilver. The Apple Blog covered it here.

#12 – Uncertainties in Taking The Tagging Leap
Well this is really just a matter of sucking it up and jumping in with both feet. My method was just to put everything I currently had in my Documents folder into a ‘pretagging’ folder and starting form that point on…

Your schema for naming needs to be something that works for you. Go back and read the first couple parts of my metadata series if you need to. But essentially, decide on the rules you’ll use, and stick to them…They’ll be guidelines too, because this system will scale as you need more tags.

Managing those tags is really a matter of using smart Spotlight Queries – I open a new Smart Folder, and search on “Spotlight Comments contains &”, and with that I get all the files I’ve ever tagged (as long as I’ve tagged them all with an & symbol).

This system is a very large leap into the future – in my opinion. We’ve been trained to think in folder for so long, that for the most part, we don’t think outside that box. But I find my files easier with tags – and faster! – than when I peruse my folder structures. But I still keep my folder hierarchies intact…Using them in conjunction with tagging makes for a pretty solid team-up of systems. After all, sometimes applications require a folder structure, or coding, and so on. So don’t feel like you need to ditch folders – it’s more of a suggestion for showing the power tagging offers.

#15 – Bulk Tagging Files
I mention this toward the end of the blog post in which the screencast is linked…You can bring many files at once into Quicksilver and apply the tags in just the same way as I showed in the screencast.

#16 – Multi Word Tags
The Spotlight Comments field is essentially a Space Separated List. So spaces in your tags will create additional tags. Punakea is a tagging app for OS X that seems to address this issue by creating a large markup profile around the tags, separating them by semi-colons. That’s great, but makes controlling your tagging methods pretty difficult, and it’s proprietary, so doesn’t play well with the rest of the OS. Maybe it’s your cup of tea, but not quite mine. Via Quicksilver, your best bet is to user underscores rather than spaces.

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I’d like to make a note before you watch the screencast:
To coin a phrase I used to hear from my father, “Do as I say, Not as I do.” You’re about to see my dirty laundry – that is, the mess that is my collection of tags. One would probably assume a utopia of perfect tagging principles…While I do follow what I preach, I’ve also been tinkering with this project for over a year. In that time I’ve tried many different approaches (apps, workflows, and so on) that inevitably created a bigger mess than it cleaned-up. But I found that keeping some of this stuff helped me test various workflows more thoroughly, thus, I left it. I just wanted to cover this point before you watched the following and said, “Ummmmm…”

So here goes!

The Metadata Screencast clocks in at about 12 minutes.

Enjoy the show.

A couple things I forgot to mention in the screencast:
- To get the Spotlight Comments entry on Save Dialogs, you’ll go to Default Folder X in the System Preferences, Settings, Open & Save. Be sure to check the box, “Ask for Spotlight Comments in Save dialogs.”
- Also, you can bring many items at once into Quicksilver and tag them all identically. So the workflow you see me perform can help you easily tag tons of files at once – provided they are all getting the same tags.

Questions will be answered in the comments section below.

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Q & A

Before we dive right back in however, I wanted to start by addressing questions of a common thread that were asked – both in the post’s comments and in the digg thread. The recurring theme of questioning was something along the lines of, “How well could it really work without any folder structure?” Well I’m afraid I wasn’t quite clear enough on that topic. Allow me to clear things up a bit.

Trying To Make A Point

When I recommend ridding the Documents folder of any folder structure – as I did when I began this project – this is more for impact. This is to show that the practice of tagging files and then locating them free of a hierarchal structure is possible, even easy. I also make the claim that you can rid yourself of those folder structures in favor of tagging practices. The point is, you can…

But these things were mainly to prove a point around the topic at hand. My Documents folder is actually still a horrendous mess if you look at it, because I actually do use my tags to locate the files I need. But in folders like Sites, where I’ve got my web projects, everything is in a typical hierarchal folder structure. In my Pictures folder, I have very specific foldering setup in order to handle and clearly organize the many photos I take and process. In both cases there are outside forces that tend to require a standard hierarchy – cleanly coding web stuff requires appropriate folders, and using a photo cataloging app like iView Media Pro thrives on proper folder structure. But all the while, I’m still applying tags to my files, and free of these outside practices which basically require proper organization, I still use the tags to quickly get at the files themselves.

Using metadata tagging in conjunction with smart foldering practices will make you just about as bullet-proof as you can get when it comes to filing and finding anything on your system. Ok, so hopefully we’ve cleared that bit up.

Now On With The Show!

While OS X supports tagging files and locating them through Spotlight, it really does a pretty poor job of promoting the practice. If you were to use nothing more than the baked-in ‘functionality’, you would have to touch the file’s Get Info window (obviously after creating it) of each file to add the tag(s) of your choice. Pretty much a pain to track down each file after it’s been created and then apply tagging – who needs an extra step in their workflow that takes that kind of effort? Granted, you can manufacture some help via Automator, but it’s still not as intuitive and streamlined as [I think] it should be.

The only way – at this time – to really streamline a file-tagging scheme is to use third party applications and utilities. There are dozens of options out there to choose from, and I’ve tried using most of them. Some of have been great tools, while others have been less than I would have liked. But even the great tools have mostly fallen by the wayside (in my workflow – I want to emphasize that, because your mileage may vary) because they haven’t fit the way I work, or rather, the system of tagging that I’ve found to work best for me.

My Tagging Bag of Tools

There should be no need for a big unveiling of the most important app [that I use] in my tagging workflow…It’s Quicksilver. Don’t ask questions, just download it if you haven’t. Food will taste better, colors will be more vibrant, your computer will become something new and wonderful you never imagined. You probably think I’m joking.

Quicksilver makes it possible to hook into just about every nook and cranny of OS X, so using it as the main interface for tagging makes the process much faster than the operating system allows on its own. But Quicksilver needs some tweaking to do the things that we want. I’ll get into the meat of these tweaks in next week’s metadata post – which will be a thorough screencast, so you can see what to do, rather than rely on my incoherent babbling – but for now, I’ll just say that advanced features will need to be enabled, and at least the ‘file tagging module (+)’ plugin will need to be installed. I’m fairly certain that additional plugins are required to support the file tagging plugin, but I’ll research that and address it in next week’s screencast, so please hold off on the questions about why it’s not working for you right now…

As great as Quicksilver is, I also found a couple other tools that I use regularly in my bag of tricks. Default Folder X, from St ClairSoft is a utility that enhances your Save Dialogs in OS X. It allows you to create favorite folders to quickly navigate to, default folders for specific apps, and so on – essentially bring one of the useful functions of Windows to the Mac platform. But the reason DFX shines in a metadata sense, is it has an option to enter Spotlight Comments for a file when you’re saving it. This right here ladies and gents, is the missing link. I would have a very difficult time believing that Apple has left such an important feature out of Leopard, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Finally, a Dashboard Widget that I’ve found to be pretty useful is TagBag. This Widget essentially collects the Spotlight Comments (the tagging field we’re talking about in this series) for all files, and displays them in a nice list. It also gives you a count of each tag. TagBag has a couple other features, one of which is the ability to click on a tag and have it open a SmartFolder search window for all files with that tag, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. No matter though, because I don’t need it for that reason. I mainly like to get a census of my tags and use it to track down odds and ends that have ended up in Spotlight Comments that I don’t want there. It won’t make or break your workflow, but it’s a handy tool for keeping track of your tags, or remembering tags that you may have forgotten about.

There’s one more little app that I’ve been playing with very recently, that could very well make this list. I love the idea and functionality, but I can’t really talk about it just yet. Hopefully at the end of the month I’ll be able to say more. But in the meantime the above programs should get you where you need to be.

Putting The Pieces Together

The first step is obviously getting into the habit of tagging your files. So obviously using Default Folder X is going to make this hugely useful for any files you’ll be creating from here on out. But what about all the existing files on your system? You can either leave them behind and just start this practice moving forward, or being the process of tagging them and getting them current in your new system.

Luckily, Quicksilver and the File Tagging plugin make this a lot less painless than it could be. My suggestion would be – if you don’t already have things foldered accordingly, group the files as you’d like to tag them. Then select all the files in a folder, bring them into Quicksilver focus, and add a tag or tags to all of those files at once. It’s really as simple as that. (Don’t worry, I’ll be demonstrating all this stuff next week in the screencast!) Then you may desire to hit files on a more individual basis to add more specific tags to their Spotlight Comments. No need for a comma separated list, just spaces – and whatever prepending symbol you’ve settled on.

The other great use for Quicksilver and the File Tagging plugin is the ability to quickly scan your catalog of tags. In this manner you can access the tags and the related files right from within Quicksilver, with only a few keystrokes. Better still, you can tell Quicksilver to open one of these tags from the catalog, and it’ll generate a SmartFolder for that tag, which you can then save for future use. I prefer this method far more than creating my SmartFolders manually, as it leaves really no room for error.

Lastly there’s the TagBag Widget. As mentioned earlier, I use it more for clean-up duty, allowing me to get my tags/files groomed a little more nicely. But from time to time it’s helpful to know just how many files are tagged a certain way with a quick glance.

Wrap Up

Obviously you may feel free to check out these tools on your own and see how they work for you. The Quicksilver and File Tagging plugin may require a little tweaking however, for them to work properly for you. I’m sure there will be comments and questions asking how to do it. As I’ve mentioned already, I’ll be addressing these issues next week, in a screencast that should show how it all gets setup and works. So if you can help it, wait for that. The following week should be the conclusion to this three-ring-circus with a road map of where I’d like to go with this workflow and some ideas on how to get there.

A few last things you may want to consider or play with until next week:

• Tagging your songs in iTunes – check out the screencast
• My friend, Weldon, found this nice doc on Apple.com, explaining how to use the operators for building Spotlight Queries.
• And if you want to experiment with Raw Spotlight Queries (an option when building SmartFolders) you may like to read this article as well.
• Check out SpotlightFS, which is a part of MacFUSE from Google. It offers some neat SmartFolder capabilities in conjunction with the reading from the 2 above links.

I’ll do my best to answer some of your questions in the comments below. But understand that if I don’t, I’ll most likely be covering them in the next week or so.

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Not quite a year ago I wrote a feature on LifeHacker talking about the use of Metadata in place of a folder-based organization scheme. Since then I’ve received many emails and inquiries asking for more on the subject. Inevitably I’ve responded with short answers and the promise of a forthcoming post here on The Apple Blog to satiate all the interested parties. I’m here to tell you, that the time has finally come my friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time tinkering with the system, trying new things, combining tools and workflows, and on and on over the year I’ve been working with the idea. So as I’ve been pondering how to approach the piece I wanted to write here on TAB, I’ve decided that doing it in parts will probably work out best. I’d like to say they’ll come out weekly, but there’s a ton of stuff clogging this brain of mine, and it may be more like bi-weekly, so just an fyi on that.

Enough of the pleasantries, eh? Let’s get started with the first installment of Metadata as a Filing System. In this part I’ll be covering the basis of my idea, the tagging structures and best practices that I’ve found work best (at least for me), and the basic goals of using this system.

Some Background to Get Up to Speed

When Tiger launched in 2005 it brought with it Spotlight for unparalleled searching capabilities. A large factor in this amazing new tech was the ability of the operating system to leverage metadata in files. What is metadata? It’s information about information…Ok, a better explanation: Metadata is the term used for details about a file. For instance, who created the file, when, how large is the file size, and so on.

But the best part came with the addition of Spotlight Comments. Accessible through the Get Info screen of any file on OS X, the Spotlight Comments field gives the user free-reign for creating customized metadata (referred to as ‘tags’ from here on out in this article). Think about tagging in the mainstream sense. Just about everyone has seen it in action with the advent of Web 2.0. Del.icio.us uses it for ‘categorizing’ bookmarks, flickr allows you to tag your images, and many blogs provide tag clouds of the many blog post categories offered within their pages. So we translate that thinking to our files and the way we organize them on our hard drive.

I’m fairly certain your hard drive is teeming with files, most likely in your Documents folder, just like mine. I’ll venture further, to guess that within that Documents folder you’ve got several more folders – maybe a ‘Letters’ folder for all your correspondences, a ‘txt’ folder for all your txt notes, a ‘work’ folder for business stuff, and so on and so forth. Maybe those folders have more nested within them…you get the idea. You’ve got the typical folder hierarchy that every semi-organized computer user has had since the computer shipped with a hard drive larger than a megabyte.

So what happens when you’ve got a letter that you wrote for a business proposal? Do you file it in your ‘Letters’ folder, or your ‘work’ folder? Or maybe a ‘Letters’ folder within your ‘work’ folder… How do you remember which place you put it in? (I know you could create an alias in the location you didn’t store it in, but humor me here – I’m not that well organized anyway!) Well the options metadata gives us, allow for us to file the letter in a general place and tag with with both ‘letter’ and ‘work’ so we can find it later based on the tag, rather than where we may have put it.

When I first started this project, I moved all the files and folders in my Documents directory, into a folder called ‘pretagging’. From there on out anything that would normally have been filed in my Documents folder hierarchy, was just dumped into Documents and left to marinate with nothing but a metadata tag (or two or three). This approach really forces you to commit to the idea of using metadata as a filing system, because then when you look at your Documents folder (rather than just searching the tag(s) in Spotlight), you just see a heaping mess of files to wade through. Great motivation to make it work, eh? So if you’re planning to play along at home, this is a great way to jump right into the deep-end.

Guidelines Are a Must

So Spotlight makes all this possible because these items are then completely searchable on your drive. Great. But before we get too carried away, we need to decide on a useful tagging structure, or set of guidelines. If you don’t, your tags will end up looking much like my initial foray into del.icio.us bookmarking, where there are 1-off tags everywhere. Not good, and not useful for searching.

It’s extremely important to have a plan in mind before you start tagging your little heart out. You don’t necessarily have to decide on the specific tags you’ll be using, because that will change and evolve over time. But keeping in mind a set of guidelines for how you’ll tag your files is the key. I like to stick to singular terms, ‘letter’, ‘project’, etc rather than trying to remember, “Did I use ‘letters’ or ‘letter’ last time?” Then you either guess right and end up ok, guess wrong, and have a 1-off tag that could ruin your search results later, or you waste more time digging to see what tag you need to match. All of these are time-wasters, and who amongst us has time to waste anymore?

So decide if you’re going to use singulars or plurals for your tags. There will of course be times when a tag you choose is most common in the plural, such as ‘keys’, or ‘taxes’. Just something to keep in the back of your mind.

Another point to consider in your guidelines is how granular you want to get with your tagging practice. So maybe you tag some files as ‘project’, but what happens when you get too many project files from different customers? This is where it gets free-form and up to you on how you handle it. You could do something like ‘project’ and ‘clientname’, or just go for broke with ‘clientnameproject’. Figure out what’s easiest and most comfortable for you.

The last thing, and probably the most important – in my opinion – is a prepending symbol for your tags. The GTD’ers use the @ sign most of the time, so I started with that. But I found that Spotlight effectively ignores the @ symbol and returns less than exact results. As an example, ‘@project’ and ‘project’ will both return the same results in Spotlight. Which is to say that they return anything in Spotlight’s index that contains the word ‘project’. That leaves a lot of wading through stuff to find just what you want. With some experimentation I landed on the & sign as one that Spotlight didn’t ignore. So now a query on ‘&project’ returns only the things that match that syntax exactly – no extraneous data or files that will slow you down. Sure you can do a Spotlight search using quotes around your @project search term, but that’s extra keystrokes, and frankly, I’m too lazy for that. So I use the & sign to prepend my tags. You can play around and find something else that may work for you, or just use the one I found.

These ideas lay a decent framework for your tagging scheme. Obviously what works for me may be different for you, so figure out your own system – if you use these guidelines to do it, you’re much more likely to find success in using metadata for your filing system.

So What’s The End Game?

For me the purpose behind all of this was to see if it was really a good alternative to the traditional practice of using folder hierarchies. I wanted to see if I could still locate my files in this manner, and if I could, was it any faster? So I suppose efficiency is the name of the game when it comes time to measuring your success.

This is where it becomes a gray area on whether or not the metadata hits the mark. If you just use the tools that OS X offers (those being Spotlight and using the Get Info screen for each individual file) then there’s no way this method stacks up. The performance gain comes in using 3rd party apps and utilities. I’ve played with many of these, and tried several combinations to determine which seem to work the best. If you’re even a casual reader of The Apple Blog, you won’t be surprised that Quicksilver is at the hub of these tools.

But as I mentioned at the start of this post, there will be a few parts to this piece. Those tools – and the best ways I’ve found for using them – are topic for a forthcoming article.

Moving Forward

There’s still a lot to come on this topic. I hesitate to say just how many installments I’m planning, because I feel like there’s enough to write up for a handful of posts. But for now I’ll venture 3 more parts to this saga. Minimum.

Amongst these future posts I’ll be covering the 3rd party tools that make the metadata system a really useful alternative, and how to put them into action for you. I’ll be putting together one of my weekly screencasts to demonstrate the system I’ve settled into. I think that will give a good feeling for what this system is capable of if you stick with it and truly own it. And finally (at least for now), I’ll talk about where I’d like to take this metadata filing scheme in the future. Essentially some ideas I’ve had for really automating things so that my computer works for me…But more on all this in coming weeks.

Q And A

There are certainly going to be questions abounding from this article. As always, I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments below. However if the questions tread heavily on forthcoming parts of this piece, my answers will likely be short ones, if at all – I’m not ignoring the validity of said questions, I just feel they’ll be more easily accessible if they’re available in the body of each article (rather than buried in the comments).

In fact, maybe I’ll make each week following one of these pieces, a post full of answers to the questions posted in the comments. I’ll have to think on that, depending on how the reaction to this post goes over. Guess we’ll all be surprised…

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First and most importantly, decide what system of tagging will work best for you. What’s your general use of these files? I tend to be a project-centric person. So my tags tend to be more about the project name, than a category that the file may fit into. What’s your end-game?

Once you know what you’re aiming for, decide on the vocabulary you’re going to use. STICK TO IT. Pluralize your tags or DON’T. Use descriptive verbs, or just basic nouns. However you decide to use your tags, stick to a system so you don’t end up with a bunch of one-offs. (pic, pictures, photo, photos, photograph, photography….) It’ll be easier if you don’t have to use wildcard search queries to bring back all the results you’re looking for.

Also, decide on how specific you want to be with your tags. Should you use ‘lettertoeditor0206′ or just ‘letter’? Will a shotgun approach of 10 simple (general) tags be more useful to you than 1 or 2 super-descriptive ones? If you’re not sure, do some testing for a couple weeks and find out what works best for your needs.

These things should get you thinking a bit. They may lead you on to other thoughts that will be even better for determining what you really need to do. If so, let us know. We could always use better processes.

On the other hand, maybe you want to follow something fairly well established, such as del.icio.us. There are tons of ‘best practices’ posted to blogs out there, so Google around a bit. That said, my del.icio.us tags are a mess – I was young and stupid, ok?!

So I skimmed some of those aforementioned Google results to see what they had to say. “Be liberal in your use of tags.” Follow what some of the more prolific del.icio.us users are doing. A study of del.icio.us tagging in a social environment.

Approach it however you feel suits you best. I find that some of the more ‘successful’ del.icio.us methods out there aren’t ideal for my Spotlight Metadata Tagging needs. Your mileage may vary.

Happy Tagging!

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