adding tags to text (and other) files

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Guest

One of the things that most excited me about Vista was the alleged ability to
add tags (aka keywords, labels) to files, and then search on those tags.

But it appears this is only supported in Office documents :-(

Is there any way to add tags to any file type? Couldn't there be an option
for Vista to put some kind of a wrapper around the file (or a header at the
beginning) which Vista could intercept and not send to the application when a
file is opened?

I'll really be disappointed if I can't put tags/labels on all my files.
This was a big selling point of Vista for me.
 
Blastdoor said:
One of the things that most excited me about Vista was the alleged ability to
add tags (aka keywords, labels) to files, and then search on those tags.

But it appears this is only supported in Office documents :-(

Is there any way to add tags to any file type? Couldn't there be an option
for Vista to put some kind of a wrapper around the file (or a header at the
beginning) which Vista could intercept and not send to the application when a
file is opened?

I'll really be disappointed if I can't put tags/labels on all my files.
This was a big selling point of Vista for me.
Click to expand...

I 100% agree.

- I'm not at all interested in tagging pictures. I know what's on them.
- I'm very keen on getting reliable metadata/tags on my business documents.
Getting rid of folders and organizing your documents just by filtering and
grouping is perfect, that's what I really need.

BUT.

As shown in RC1, applying metadata to files is just boring. I really don't
want to click through several pages, I want a context menu that gives my most
popular tags etc. See del.icio.us. - it works. And it's a stupid
web-application, no fat client.

Right now, I'm not able to
- add metadata to PDFs and several other documents
- add metadata to a hole bunch of files (e.g. all files in a specific folder).

Sorry, but this is completely pointless and nothing but futile. VISTA ought
to be a tool for serious work in the first place, not for organizing my
pictures (which, by the way, PICASA dies oh so much better).
 
I've done some further looking into this after my original post. My wife
recently bought a MacBook, and so I've been trying to learn more about how
OSX handles meta-data. My impression is that it is slightly superior to
Vista, in so far as it allows every file type to have something called
"spotlight comments" associated with it. So far as I can tell, "spotlight
comments" are essentially keywords/tags. The Finder (the Mac analogue of
Windows Explorer) isn't very good at letting you interact with these
keywords. However, I found a third party app called Meta that appears to
provide a much nicer interface (though I have not used it myself) for
managing these spotlight comments (applying comments to lots of files at
once, filtering files by comments, etc).

I also found that OSX 10.4 (Tiger) appears to have lower-level support for
quite a bit of meta-data, but that this support is not yet accessible from
the higher-level GUI. I can't help but wonder if these features will be more
fully developed in the next release of OSX (due out next spring).

This, combined with other disappointments in my experience with Vista RC1,
is leading me to seriously consider a Mac for the first time since the mid
1990s. Heck, if I buy it and don't like it, I can always revert to Windows
(Apple should have made the move to Intel a long time ago!)
 
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