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33 Comments
- nirav72, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Damnit..Coming from the windows world , where we were promised WinFS , but never got it....I'm jealous!!!! Maybe's its time I switched to a MAC.
- WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6That's what iTunes is for... Spotlight can also search by ID3 tag info, so that is an option if you want... But I have my music organized in folders by Genre/Artist/Album, so that's never an issue.
- WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7This is a great time-saving tip, but I'm not quite ready to stop organizing my files in folders quite yet... For certain categories of files, like 'downloads' that are always getting added to, it's fine to just dump them in a single directory and use date modified or search terms to find them. For others, however, it makes sense to organize them into folders. Music files in an album, for example, or TV episodes from a particular show, and many other classes of files make sense to group in the filesystem, as they are always going to be related to each other. Also, it's not possible to make complex search queries with Spotlight, such as "find all files with keyword 'x' but without keyword 'y'" without delving into the command line. If there were a way to perform an advanced search without having to use the Terminal, then we would certainly be closer to being able to forego folder hierarchies as a practical concern for end users.
- Tordenflesk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7"ditching hierarchical filing." Why would you ditch that? Having all files scattered all over multiple disks Would be hell when backing up or reinstallinig the OS.
- greyfade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4BeOS did this in a quite interesting way. since metadata was stored at the inode level, and since all metadata was fully indexed, it only made sense to use metadata appropriately: tracker, by default, would extract ID3 tags from MP3s and store that information in the inodes, let the filesystem driver index it all, and then it was possible to simply perform an SQL-like query (or simply a glob match search) on the entire filesystem - giving you instant results and feedback on the available files.
... it's just a shame it never really caught on. - phatcactus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5What exactly is the benefit of being disorganized? I can use spotlight to find things and still keep ***** in its place. Imagine trying to pass files off to a coworker with this system.
- meatmcguffin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It would be hell for creating websites as well
- nafisto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you have a fully metadata-based file system, you could base your backups and OS installs/upgrades on metadata as well. It's not like your current hierarchical FS organizes files neatly on disk anyway.
Metadata-based FS's really shine when you think about network shares. Your users wouldn't have to be restricted by one person's choice of hierarchy. And if you could formulate queries/views that span the network, you would basically end up with something very similar to a P2P file store, where the source of the files is completely invisible to the end user.
Once upon a time, this would have been a nightmare to manage--but processing speeds and network bandwidth make it possible today. - drlha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes, Apple provides command line tools for dealing with metadata.
- drakethegreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think its important to note the ease of moving files into folders, etc. Given how applications currently work. Two things need to happen before this sort of thing becomes a real alternative. Applications need to support tagging files as an alternative to folder saving (obviously offering both). Then the second is files you download should already be tagged with labels that make sense by the person who provides them. So if I download a song from Apple it should already have spotlight tags for the artist, song title, album, genre, and maybe a tag for general music.
- 1021, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2absolutely, I love this feature in vista but you can't tag certain files like text files, etc.
- darthmullet, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3You should have switched a long time ago. ;-)
- TheZorch, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"Damnit..Coming from the windows world , where we were promised WinFS , but never got it....I'm jealous!!!! Maybe's its time I switched to a MAC."
At last someone actually gets a clue! - nandabanaotakun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Try the manpages for mdls, mdfind, and mdimport
- geoken, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"That's what iTunes is for... Spotlight can also search by ID3 tag info, so that is an option if you want... But I have my music organized in folders by Genre/Artist/Album, so that's never an issue."
If you're just going to use your music management software then why would you even care about the folder structure?
Anyway say for some reason you wan't to go into your actual filesystem and sort by artist, if an artist has songs in multiple genres then you're lost. I mean I have artists who have songs in the Drum'n'bass, dub & reggae genre. Using the Genre/Artist/Album static folder set up it would be impossible for me to view all of this artists songs/albums at once. Or how about if you have an artist who almost exclusively releases singles (like most drum'n'bass artists). You can have 6 songs stored under 6 different album folders, where it would make alot more sense to just store them under the artists name and forgo the album. With virtual dynamic folders you can sort your music, on the fly, by whatever folder structure suits you at the moment, rather than being forced to choose which folder structure provides the smallest compromise. - jakemiles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's a good idea, but I do quite a bit of my file navigation in the unix command line.
Is there a way to access the file metadata at the command-line? If so a simple script might make this workable there too. - 1021, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yeah... just like you can do in vista. It's really nice to quickly pull out files with particular tags and save them as a collection which grows as you add more content.
- drbaggy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Your world is hierarchical, your brain works hierarchically so why screw your system over with a silly system which doesn't work your brain or the world works.... Let alone the performance issues with such an anarchic structure... Hierarchies have been in use for years because that's how things work!
- chromaphobic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I might more seriously consider this if Apple would make it easier to enter/edit said metadata. I have to open the "Get Info" window for each file, one at a time, to enter said tags/keywords? Yep, and it sucks. It's such an ugly un-Apple like way of doing things. Here's hoping one of those fabled "top secret" features for Panther involves fixing this crappy metadata methodology.
In fact, a combination of a well-organized file/folder hierarchy and easy to use tagging would be ideal. Not just with Spotlight, but with Smart Folders as well. I kinda do so now, but metadata editing is so clunky that I haven't fully implemented it. C'mon Apple, fix this! - ngmcs8203, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1These concepts can easily be adopted from how this book suggests managing your photo archives. There's a process that you start using and it basically lets you keep the folders that are dynamic still, but the whole thing is that you eventually just file those dynamic files away once they become static.
http://www.thedambook.com/
Very good Digital Asset Management techniques. - KibibyteBrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As a computer engineer, when I hear file system, I keep thinking about how the files are actually stored on disk, and not how they appear to the user. Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think we need better terminology to differentiate the high level and low level interpretations of "filesystem".
That being said, the nice thing about traditional file systems is that they resemble the way the index and or pointer structures on the low level file system and disk are arranged, at least to an extent. I would really not want to lose an inode pointer ton one of the 4 folders on my system with some "jumble all the files in one directory" styles of management. There are also performance gains in traversing well sorted trees, at least on some filesystem types. I don't think its a good idea to give up the old school way just yet. - EricAnderton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@greyfade: "... it's just a shame it never really caught on."
It is a shame. Why don't we have that as an optional fs on linux already?
I think what killed this feature is that when BeOS came out, it was right on the cusp of widespread mp3 file sharing. If it had held onto the spotlight (pun not intended) for another year or two, people looking for ways to organize their booty from napster would have seen something like that as a huge boon.
Think about it: what is metadata really good for? Organizing hundreds to thousands of media files, that's what. And only select groups of college students, pirates and hackers were in that category in 1998. - KibibyteBrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@greyfade Indeed, its a shame BeOS in general did not. NeXT was nice for developers(I use openstep), but BeOS would have been a way better successor to MacOS9 as the base for MacOSX for a multimedia/user-centric OS. If only Be's management was not so greedy, as BeOS was Apple's first choice...
- BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Metadata is great, but the hype about flat file systems is a perfect case of the emperor's new clothes.
Not only is there little-or-no advantage to a flat file system organised with metadata vs. a hierarchical file system organised with metadata, but you actually introduce some quite serious overhead for certain tasks - turning things like temp file management into "compute-which-files then act on x y and z" instead of just "act on everything in tmp/".
Hierarchical file systems *with* a great fast system of indexed searchable metadata are GREAT, and can *contain* large flat file systems for any tasks which benefit from it (I'm pretty sure lots of us do this with music or movies).
On the other hand, files which have no clear cognitive association with each other can have their relationships quickly revealed by examining the structure they live in, this is discoverability, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone has got *something* out of their computers through discoverability at some point.
I worked on a unix-based indexing/search program and GUI client for a while, and tried out flat file systems as part of that - I found that searching by tags can be distinctly unintuitive unless you emulate this sort of discoverability in the GUI navigation/search tools anyway, so why work hard to remove something just to work hard reinventing it badly in the tools?
Flat file systems are another of these "looks good in a press release, not so good in practise" ideas. The emperor has no revolutionary new filesystem paradigm, folks. - johanc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0nafisto: Have a look at http://www.inuron.com/movies-intro.html , that is exactly what inuron is doing. Aggregated metadata filesystem, even usable over the internet and even accesible by windowz clients.
- eohlin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Great article! I look forward to the next installments!
Has anyone taken a look at SpotlightFS? This is from the Google team and it’s an implementation of the MacFUSE filesystem which dynamically queries Spotlight to create the directory structure.
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SPOTLIGHTFS - alicheuszDigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Punakea is very handy tagging app it make tag cloud like in web pages and much more. It works these same way as method described above.
http://www.nudgenudge.eu/punakea - ecniv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0> For certain categories of files, like 'downloads' that are always getting added to, it's fine to just dump them in a
> single directory and use date modified or search terms to find them. For others, however, it makes sense to
> organize them into folders.
Yeah, I like keeping my downloads folder organized, but it's hard to keep up with. It sucks downloading a bunch of stuff into your downloads folder only to have to go in and file things later. I use hazel to keep from having to do it too often:
http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.html
For part of my work, I download "diagnostic" files (conveniently, they contain "diagnostic" in the filename). I created a rule in hazel to automatically move the file to my "Documents/Customers/diagnostics" folder. It sets the finder color to green, so I can pick out the recent ones easily. I have another related rule, that checks the files in that folder - if they're more than 2 days old, it removes the color, and if they're more than a week old AND I haven't opened the file in more than a week, it trashes it.
I tried smart folders, but IMHO, they just mask the problem - I can't pretend my home dir is organized when the files are actually all over the place. Maybe it's just my OCD acting up again. - TheMacThinker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It is definitely helpful to know a little more of the commands that help getting the most out of spotlight…
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http://www.mostofmymac.com - geoken, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3FYI, you can do this in Vista.
- geoken, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Why would it be bad for music files? I think that's one of the best uses of it. In Vista I have all my music files lumped in one big folder. This folder is set up for stack veiw, a stack is esentially a smart folder created on the fly, for example you'd go into the folder right click -> stack by -> album and all the files get sorted into virtual folders by album. If I decided I wan't to look at them by genre instead, I just change the stack by paramater to genre, or artist, or rating, or whatever.
- sprocketjockey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I found spent a bit of time tagging items in something like yojimbo so that I could create or locate relationships between items. But then realized that DevonTHINK Pro could do all the relationship configuring for me; and think that is a much better program for organizing my "stuff".
Personally, I think the mydreamapp idea of the "stickies on everything" would be the way to go... - brad06, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3QuickSilver
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
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