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Desktop search in Vista–files meet tags

by Tris Hussey on February 5th, 2007

While I’m still waiting for my copy of Vista to arrive (looks like Friday-ish), I’ve been reading up on it to see how it’s going to help me do “stuff” better.  Besides gathering up tons of install tips (no I’m not doing a clean install), I’ve been looking at the built-in improvements to search.  LifeHacker has a super tutorial on something I didn’t know Vista was going to handle, letting you assign tags to files

Tagging has taken off on the web, but what about on your hard drive? On the heels of Mac OS X’s file tagging and Smart Folders features, Windows Vista users can now tag their files and use those keywords to organize and search documents on their desktop.
Back in April, guest author Nick Santilli described how he uses metadata as a filing system on his Mac. Today, with Windows Vista, this method works on a PC as well. Let’s take a look at the not-perfect-but-a-good-start file tagging and saved search features of Vista.

I played with a desktop search app couple years ago that had something like smart folders, but this is much better.  Since it’s only going to really work well with Office files, I’ll focus on that.

So you write proposals for your job.  Great.  How do you file them?  All proposals together?  By client?  By product?  What about all the other files?  Yeah, it can be a mess.  So this is what I’m going to do.  As a part of One By One Media, I write a lot of proposals and file the others people write.  And then are are metrics, and plugins, and notes.  So I’ll be tagging stuff like this.  A proposal will be [proposals,OBO,client,] at least.  Over time this will let me put all proposals together, all client documents together (like NDAs and contracts), all OBO stuff together.

In the end I think the concept of folders might become less important, it’s going to be the oft-heralded metadata that will be important.  Folders out the window?  No way.  Until computers are blazing fast and search nearly infallible you’re still going to want to have some level of organization to keep things straight.

Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all the Vista goodies as I learn them.

Tags: Vista, desktop search, metadata, tagging

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POSTED IN: Cool tools, Software tips, Time savers, Vista, Windows