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Comment by Tooluka | Hacker News Reader

Shoes are simple. But where did you put the backup debit bank card? To the "finance" stuff? Or to the "plastic card" pile? Where to put spare photos for documents - near the foreign passport cause you'll surely need both of them next time? Or to the unsorted photos pile? Where should we put spare screws from a new shelf - on that shelf or in the toolbox with other screws? Etc. etc.

This is why directories are getting old - they allow only one tag for a file - the folder name. New systems, like iTunes and others are introducing concept of advanced tags - you can find the same file in the Author "dir" in the Genre "dir" in the Type "dir" etc. They aren't perfect yet but they are being refined all will be dominant in the future.

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Which is why it'd be nice if filesystems supported labels. I'd keep the directory structure, but I want to be able to apply the "2004 vacations" label on a all files in a given directory. Then you can add other particular labels to some files.

I don't want to have to manage labels separately for iPhoto, for Picasa and for all the possible image viewers that I'll use in the future.

Even when I disable in every machine I use, that's the idea behind KDE's Nepomuk.

http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user

Yes, yes, yes. I've been fighting photo management software for years when all I want is the ability to tag files.

Windows have had that for years now.

But I guess since Apple haven't done it yet, it doesn't exist to hipsters.

Shoes aren't simple for everyone. My wife's friend has a pretty robust system for managing dozens of pairs of shoes.

The point is, unlike iTunes where you have a consistent and generally understood metadata system, people have their own systems to deal with arbitrary needs, whether that be shoes or code.

Being prescriptive and pushing a single "one true path" for everyone isn't solving problems. And computers are supposed to be here to solve problems.

The argument really isn't labels vs. directories but files vs. siloed databases. The fact that iTunes knows one tag doesn't do me any good for finding the file for use in another application. Labels are great things, but they're much less usable than directories because they're totally siloed to individual applications. iOS definitely does not have a filesystem that replaces folders with tags.

"This is why directories are getting old - they allow only one tag for a file"

Erm, no. A file can be tagged (linked) into as many directory locations as you like. This is what hardlinks do and it is not a new concept.

hardlinks? Jeez... most programmers and sysadmins I've mentioned them to don't even understand hardlinks.

Are you suggesting that hardlinks are good enough for my mom, too?

Actually I believe you're suggesting that the paradigm of tagging files may be inappropriately complex for most users. And I would agree.

The point is that we've had the ability to apply tags since the dawn of unix. It remains an obscure feature because as you say most users are uninterested.

Shortcuts do basically the same thing, and my grandmother understands shortcuts.

This reminds me of an old story: a user backup all his documents by burning them into a CD, only to get his IT department discovered he only backup desktop shortcuts instead of the real file.

This is the main difference between hard links and shortcuts. The above scenario won't likely to happen with hard links (because they're actual files). As with jcromartie, I have a really hard time explaining that hardlinks are not shortcuts even to programmers.

I can't imagine my dad (hell, even my brother) will ever going to understand hardlinks. He don't even understand how shortcuts works (only how to use it).

>I have a really hard time explaining that hardlinks are not shortcuts even to programmers.

While the distinction is important to programmers and sysadmins, the average end-user treats shortcuts as if they were hard links, it would not make the UI more complicated to change the 'make link' behavior to hard-link instead of sym-link.

Yes it won't, but when you have to introduce the concept of multiple files could point to the exactly same data on the hard drive and no, it's not a "copy" of that file, it's rather mind-blowing.

You need better programmers and sysadmins.

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