The Metadata Screecast that I posted yesterday generated enough questions that I felt it necessary to address them in a post, rather than a HUGE comment, buried at the end of the comments. So here it is. Each Answer references the number of the comment it relates to.
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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