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But physical paper has basic restrictions that digital media doesn't - like lack of easily searchable metadata, and being able to be in multiple groups at one time.

My photos (many thousands of them) are stored in folders by date, but I pretty much never search them that way. I use Lightroom, which automaticaly puts basic stuff like date in there, and allows me to tag every photo with things location, themes, people, ratings etc. It also allows me to put them into (multiple, if I want) groups. And it's combinations of these things that I use to locate my photos - e.g. all the photos of my daughter in Berlin in 2008.

My music is little different - I might fancy listening to a specific album, or a random bunch of jazz tracks or whatever. I get to them through my music app, not through the filesystem.

Some other stuff still relies more on basic directory structures, but that's only because I've not found a suitable set of tools that provide me with a full metadata approach just yet.

And yes, a lot of people would probably initially struggle with moving away from directories and over to a metadata-based world, but that's more to do with the fact that it's what they are currently used to than it being a fundamentally better approach.

And just because two files are in different folders you can't still tag them and make them part of the bigger concept?

In fact with folders and tagging you are getting the best of both worlds.

I didn't say that you couldn't tag them if they are in folders. My point is that a fixed directory structure is pretty much irrelevant to how I usually want to manage/search my photos etc - it adds pretty much nothing to what I can manage far more flexibly through the metadata.

Except when searching by metadata doesn't find what you want. Or when it finds too much. This is now 99% case for me when I use spotlight.

I have a huge library of PDF books (tens of gigabytes). If I search for a bunch of keywords or even if I know entire title, the damn spotlight returns way too many irrelevant results. Now I could perhaps spend 10 - 20 seconds thinking about how to write a more specific query, but it's faster to actually go to ~/Reference/Computer Science/CS Theory/ and get right to my damn book, which I know will be there based on how I structured my filesystem and the topic the book covers.

This has in fact gotten worse since snow leopard, before the default was to show file name matches first then content matches. So if you want a book on algorithms, almost all CS theory books will match. You have to type filename:"book title" to be more specific.

Now one could argue that Spotlight should get better. But I'm arguing that you will always encounter cases where it will be really difficult to find what you want, even if you know a lot about what you are searching, let alone if you vaguely remember a detail about what you want to find. But by being able to restrict what you are looking for you will have better luck.

Searching for photos is much easier, because photos are binary content, so apart from EXIF there is not much to look for in there. But if you have documents with plain text or searchable content like PDFs, things get a lot worse.

I agree that Spotlight is dreadful. But that's not really an issue with metadata per se. After all, OSX is still primarily a traditional directory-based OS.

> it's faster to actually go to ~/Reference/Computer Science/CS Theory/

That's fine if this is the only way you ever want to structure your documents, and if you've not got too many of a particular subject. Say you've got hundreds of CS books, some of them have stuff about graphics in them, some of them have stuff about OSX programming in them, and some have both. Now you want to find a book about OSX graphics. Did you store them by subject (maybe not, because the books have loads of topics), or by OS (most of them are OS-agnostic, and some cover multiple OSs, so again maybe not). Do you remember where you stored it?

This is a pretty simple example, but it's exactly the challenge I face on a regular basis when using the fixed hierarchy of the filesystem. Do I store info about my motorbike crash along with other letters I wrote in 2008, or with other info about my bike, or other info about insurance, or medical issues etc? What I want to do is tag it with all of those things, because I might be looking for it for any one of those reasons.

If you want a hierarchical approach, then Lightroom as an example shows how you can still do this - it just allows you almost total freedom with how you do it - files can be in as many collections (and as nested) as you want.

Your two examples are both forms of media that require content management to be manageable at scale. In many ways, for photos, audio and video, rich metadata is more important than the actual data. People use iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa, etc. Enterprises use SharePoint and Filenet.

My guess is that at least 80% of that kind of media is managed via applications using specialized apps using metadata.

The "other stuff" that you speak of isn't equipped with rich and consistent metadata.

Think of it this way. Your iTunes folders are exactly the same as mine, there is just a variance in the music that you have. Your photo application is very similar to mine -- the variance will be the degree to which you organize events and add metadata.

Other stuff is different. Look at a folder that you use for a specific project. The chances are, you have documents in there created by multiple people. You probably have scanned documents with no metadata. Maybe even spreadsheets with financial data or some code examples. Whatever you have, there is a high chance that it looks completely different from my directory in key ways. Even the metadata may be inconsistent -- I tag some files for searching and add spotlight comments on the Mac. Most of my colleagues do not. The ones that do don't use the same conventions as I do.

In the real world, I need to look through the documents about Project X, which was implemented in 2009 to plan for a refresh of the project. The people who were here then are mostly gone. If I'm relying on metadata, how in the hell am I going to find Project X documents? How do I find things when I don't know what I'm looking for.

In the physical world, we have drawers, boxes and folders. In the digital world, we have filesystems. That isn't going anywhere, even if Apple decides to drag many people backwards.

I agree that a lot of other documents don't have the metadata that they need to allow them to be managed in this flexible manner. But that doesn't mean that a fixed directory structure is a fundamentally better approach - it simply means that these file types (or the users that create them) haven't caught up with the benefits that proper metadata tagging would give.

In answer to your question about Project X - if the documents were able to be (and actually were) tagged with "Project X", and "2009", it would be extremely straightforward.

Using a fixed directory structure, you're relying on the fact that you know where it was stored. Did you choose to store your projects by date? If so, can you remember when it was done? Was it stored by client? Can you remember which client it was for? Was it stored by development team? Which team created it? In a metadata world, all of those things could be tagged independently against any relevant document and you simply do a search for the attributes that you're interested in.

I think it's highly dependent on the type of person, or family. For example I have had to help many people track down their documents which are somewhere in a download or documents folder. I, personally, am not the kind of person who sorts my paperwork into folders. Neither, like some people, do I organise every single e-mail into a folder. Gmail has understood this well, and makes it easier to find what I want. I find it much easier to make sure I know _when_ something happened, I make sure I e-mail myself notes, and copies of documents, but most of the time it happens by itself anyway, so I can search for them in Gmail. For example if I want to find some paperwork done when we moved into a new house, I can track down the date in Gmail, and know in which box to go dig it up. Most of the time what I need has an e-mail record somewhere.

That said, I strongly support allowing people to approach the problem from both sides, chronological with good tagging/searching or being able to organise things into folders in a way they like. People work in different ways. However, I think the default is to be disorganised, and the best way to deal with being disorganised is to keep it as simple as possible.

From what I've seen on the computers I've used, non-technical people seem to have far better filing systems in general. My mum and dad both organise their files and emails impeccably, whereas my file structure is so badly organised I can literally lose files for years before rediscovering them like an archeologist on a dig.

They also likely have a much lower volume of files to manage, being non-technical and all. I could probably get by with the single folder level at home, where I mostly just browse the internet and watch video on my PC, but having to manage all my various projects at work would be a nightmare.

How are you supposed to check out a source code repository? Many frameworks require things to be in a specific folder structure in order to work.

> At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc.

Inside one of the manila folders, do you keep an apartment building, with 12 floors, each floor with 20 apartments, each apartment with 3 rooms, each with 4 racks, 3 shelves on each, each shelf with 50 manila folders? Inside one folder, do you keep a wormhole to the 2nd bedroom in apartment 1409 in the building 2 doors down from the apartment building I first mentioned?

I think having levels of folders is a good idea, each level with different names, e.g. 4 levels: house, room, shelf, and folder.