Tagging files in Windows XP (and why you’ll ditch Google Desktop)
A faculty member has a zillion files of various types for the classes he teaches. He originally organized the files in folders by class and week, but now he realizes that he needs a better way to find content within this hierarchy, such as when there is a change in textbook, or when student interests take an unexpected turn, or whatever. I know he wants to use metadata to search his files, but there isn’t a furl or del.icio.us for the desktop, is there?
Not quite, but we can take advantage of some of the extended file attributes in Windows and get at that data using other tools such as Windows Desktop Search or Copernic Desktop Search.
Adding metadata
First, let’s add some metadata to a file–any old file. We can do this by right-clicking a file, selecting Properties, and then selecting the Summary tab. Here we have the option of adding all kinds of information: title, subject, author, category, keywords, and comments. I recommend going to town with the category and keywords fields.
If you select the Custom tab, you can add metadata for many more fields, and even create your own.
Finding (searching) metadata
You can use the basic Windows search feature if you don’t mind waiting for your results. In my preliminary tests, my keywords were found, but after Windows searched most of my hard drive. A better option is to use a desktop search tool like Windows Desktop Search (WDS) or Copernic Desktop Search (CDS). The advantage to using one of these applications is that they index your hard drive before you search, so you don’t have to wait for your results like you do with the default Windows search.
In my tests, both WDS and CDS were able to find my keywords tags. However, only WDS was able to find my custom tag.
I’ve used Google Desktop Search (GDS) since if first came out. I was expecting to tag some files and easily find them with GDS; however, GDS does not index keywords metadata. I’m not quite sure why that is, unless google has something up its sleeve that will eventually let us label files a la gmail.
Well, my friend has a good bit of work to do to tag his files with keywords. Is it worth it? I guess that’s a matter of opinion.
February 10th, 2006 - 4:34 pm
[…] 3. Tag all of your song ideas I can’t personally speak for windows users, but with Spotlight for the Mac you can find any file quickly with just a couple of keywords. Adding metadata to your song ideas will help you organize them and find them quickly. If you called a .txt file ‘title-windowless-room.txt’ or ’song-windowless-room.txt’, then you’ll be able to find them by name. But if you tag them with other descriptive terms like ‘happy’ or ‘rock anthem’, you’ll be able to make unique connections between all of your captured song ideas using criteria like emotional content, subject matter, tempo, or key signature. […]
February 22nd, 2006 - 3:24 am
I really want to use tagging on my Windows XP installation, but it’s just so fiddly. I wish somebody could write a script or something that would allow for drag n drop or click tagging, ala the delicious extension for firefox.
February 23rd, 2006 - 9:33 am
While I was reading up on metadata I learned that XP was supposed to have had it all worked out from the get go, but Microsoft keeps delaying it. I read that it is supposed to be ready for Vista, but I’m not clear how easy the tagging will be in terms of user interface. As you point out, the XP interface is less than perfect.
Gnome/linux users have vazaar, but it doesn’t save the metadata with the file; instead, it uses an xml file.
February 28th, 2006 - 9:15 am
[…] After searching for ideas a bit, I came across this. The post explains how you can add metadata (including keywords) to any file in Windows XP. By using Windows Desktop Search or Copernic Desktop Search, you can quickly search your files, including the metadata stuff. The problem that I have with this system, though, is a matter of speed. […]
May 1st, 2006 - 10:04 am
Great explanation. Personally, I think Google Desktop is a better choice for me since I’m too lazy to tag my files, but can generally recall enough about content contained within a file I’m looking for to quickly retrieve it via desktop search.
When would you consider tagging superior to just using desktop search?
May 3rd, 2006 - 9:59 am
Metadata as a filing system on Windows
For Windows users interested in Nick Santilli’s recent article, Metadata as a filing system, blogger Todd Slater has a Windows alternative. Right click on a file in Windows Explorer and choose Properties. In the Summary tab, enter keywords and a…
May 3rd, 2006 - 12:46 pm
How do you get teh Windows basic search function to do ‘tag1′ OR ‘tag2′ search to display items that contain either tag but not necesarily both tags?
May 3rd, 2006 - 3:39 pm
i just tested this on windows xp pro with WDS.
I’ve been working on resume stuff lately (for me and my cousin) and tagged some files in various places with the following:
“brandon”
“resume”
“david”
“help”
by putting the following into WDS, i can show files that are “resume help” related:
search -> keywords:resume AND keywords:help
to search for brandon’s resume documents, i did:
search -> keywords:resume AND keywords:brandon
to search for anything tagged resume, just do:
search -> keywords:resume
May 3rd, 2006 - 4:05 pm
[…] […]
May 3rd, 2006 - 7:49 pm
Personally, I was afraid to use the Windows properties method because the information/keywords stay attached to the file even when the file is sent to someone else. Instead I use Personal Data Librarian which has clickable, predefined keywords in tree format. I love it.
http://www.lavaplume.com/
May 7th, 2006 - 3:23 am
I think the filename plus the contents are a better search heuristic than manually tagging. It is a massive amount of laborious effort to tag all of your files, but I can see it might be a better system in the long run for you.
May 18th, 2006 - 7:23 pm
[…] Big IDEA » Tagging files in Windows XP (and why you’ll ditch Google Desktop) (tags: tagging windows search desktop tags microsoft files Computer lifehacks organization productivity tips) […]
June 19th, 2006 - 2:26 am
links for 2006-06-19…
Box.net graduates from college (tags: web2.0 online storage) ?????USB??? (tags: USB Light) TechEBlog: ????????? (tags: Garage automated Japan) ????????: Maxtor Fusion? (tags: storage maxtor fusion) ???????????? (tags: Home China chinese ???) [??]Intel…
June 21st, 2006 - 7:01 pm
I have been playing with tagging files. I have found inconsistency in behavior of the whole system. Right click on the file name or icon in the Windows Explorer and a window pops us with tabs labled “custom” and “summary”. That is, sometimes this happens. At other times, only the “summary” tab is available. Under the “summary” tab there is a field called “category”. Sometimes this field is grayed out and will not accept entries. I down-loaded a picture of the “Mona Lisa” from the Internet as a test file. None of the fields under the “summary” tab will accept entries, though none are grayed out. Also under the “summary tab, is a field called “keyword”. This field usually accepts entries, but when I display (view | choose details) the “keyword” field in the Windows Explorer, the header is displayed, but none of the values are displayed (the values are attached to the files and can be displayed by right clicking on the picture and choosing “properties”). Numerals in the “title” field under “summary” can be sorted in the Windows Explorer, but it does not appear to be consistently either a numerical or a character collating sequence sort. These behaviors do not appear correllated with file type or directory (folder) properties.
June 22nd, 2006 - 1:32 pm
why is it that when I come back to this URL I still find my e-mail address filled in even though you claim it will not be published?
June 22nd, 2006 - 2:24 pm
Jim, your email is not published, the browser simply remembers the form fields you’ve filled out. If you clear your browser cache and remembered form fields, close the browser and come back, it won’t remember you. Again, your email is not published.
July 13th, 2006 - 6:52 pm
Tagging files in Windows…
For a long time I’ve been sorting the files on my computer into folders that are arranged by the different types of projects I’m working on. There’s a lot of issues with arranging data in that manner that are dealt with in detail in a…
July 13th, 2006 - 6:52 pm
[…] I’ve been looking for ways to integrate the above two tools/techniques and Big Idea has an excellent tip on getting this done. Only downside is that this involves a bunch of effort to click through to the Properties of the file and then to Summary and then to Keywords to add them in. Now only if I can find an easy way to change this attribute of the file. […]
July 19th, 2006 - 7:05 pm
[…] I’m a new reader to lifehacker.com but they have some good articles about how to work better in this digital age and sure enough, in my google search the sixth article mentioned was from Lifehacker. Another article that was useful and more specific to MS Windows is from Big IDEA. Good stuff and definitely worth keeping my eye on, now if only there were a right now solution that didn’t involve using Quicksilver. » Permalink […]
September 3rd, 2006 - 10:15 am
I’ve found the same as Jim (21st June, above).
Using properties/summary I’ve used a number of the fields to record data about photos and by using view/choose details the data appears in XP’s details folder view.
This would be very useful to me save for one problem: for quite a number of photos the data disappears as soon as I exit the summary pane. There doesn’t seem to be any common pattern: out of a batch of photos of similar subject matter, taken at the same time, on the same camera and transferred to the same folder at the same time some will accept data and some won’t. If anyone know what the problem is I would love to know.
I use XP Home.
September 4th, 2006 - 5:44 pm
I have been playing around with the windows image tags as well.
I scanned about 200 pictures for my family tree and entered Subject, Title and Comments in the Windows tags. Now I want to display the pictures with comments and subject showing. (preferably a webpage) Does anyone have any ideas on how to get this information off of the pic and printed out under the image?
September 6th, 2006 - 8:11 am
[…] I noticed that in the comments to my post about tagging files in Windows XP, some people are trying to tag digital pictures, with varying degrees of success. I would highly recommend against tagging images using Windows XP’s file properties. There are free tools that will let you manage and tag your photos much more reliably than any XP hack. […]
September 8th, 2006 - 1:42 am
I’ve been developing a standalone application called ‘Tagg’ which allows you to add a file name alias, metadata keywords and descriptions to any file but rather than modify the physical file it maintains a database which contains pointers to the files.
Tagg also has plugins which allow you to preview files such as images, audio, zip, txt and html.
You can download a trial copy from http://www.taggtool.com/download.php - full version costs $24.99.
I’d love to hear some feedback.
Thanks,
Phillip
September 12th, 2006 - 3:18 pm
hey umm yeah. Don’t do drugs or drink.
Thanks,
Joe
January 24th, 2007 - 4:24 pm
Microsoft just released a tool to tag you pictures: Microsoft Photo Info. It can tag many pictures at once and edit advanced metadata of you pictures within Windows Explorer. It can be downloaded from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/photoinfo.mspx
January 31st, 2007 - 1:08 pm
Why bother with metatags? Much simpler to just put the tags in the filename - works with any system, not just XP. The quickest way to find a file is using something which indexes your hard drive. I find Avafind from http://www.think-less-do-more.com/ to be very reliable, quick and is not bloatware.
February 5th, 2007 - 5:18 pm
Putting tagging information in the filename will not work for me. My needs are more complicated. I would get extremely long filenames. I wish to organize photographs of dancers and atheletes engaged in their various activities. I wish the photographs to be retrievable by body position (position of any, all, or a combination of movable joints, by camera angle relative to the body, and by portion of the body shown, and by which portion of the body appears to bear weight or stress. For ballroom dancers, there will be two people in the phograph. The details of each are of interst, their position relative to each other is of interest, and their position relative to the floor is of interst. This is far too much information to be put in a filename. I need a system that can accomodate all of this information but that will function with only partial information when I choose not to fully characterize each photograph. I would also like to be able to associate one photgraph with another as in a time sequence of photographs of a continuous motion.
February 6th, 2007 - 3:41 am
Hard work to tag all files. I already have my files tagged with comments in OSX. Is there anyone that have seen an app. that can transfer OSX comments to XP comments?
February 6th, 2007 - 3:48 am
Photoshop Elements has some nice taggging features too. Very easy to work with tags, select pictures with tags or combination of tags. Adding tags to your pictures, just by using your mouse and drag and drop the tags. You can assign some thumbnail to your tags to easily recognize them…the tags created with Photoshop Elements are also saved into the metadata of the picture. So you can work with other metadata programs and you are not limited to Photoshop elements…But it still requires lot of time to tag your pictures, but I think it’s worth it.
CIAO!
VOODOOS!L
February 9th, 2007 - 1:46 pm
These guys www.sidefinder.net have a tagging app with a plug-in to Outlook that is the slickest interface I’ve seen yet. They are also building more plugins for IE, Explorer, Firefox, etc. Nice thing about it is the tags will be unified for everything and it doesn’t change the app that it plugs into - it just allows tagging within it.
February 9th, 2007 - 3:04 pm
This page still ranks high on google searches so I’ll add another update. Finally file tagging software is being developed for Windows:
http://www.tag2find.com/
It’s in pre-beta but works pretty well in my opinion. Not for sluggish computers though. A great alternative to Desktop Search which has its limits (such as searching for numerical-content documents that don’t contain identifiable text). The tagging takes some time to setup but is really good for accurate archiving.
February 18th, 2007 - 10:03 pm
I have a major problem with this, in that for any number of file types–but .html and its variants in particular–there is no ‘Summary’ tab in Properties. I use Folder Remarker to nevertheless leave a comment of sorts, but readable only in the status bar. Is there any explanation of this peculiar lack or, better yet, a way of correcting it?
March 4th, 2007 - 10:51 am
Have any of you come accross Phlat (http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/phlat/) from Microsoft?
“One of the most interesting features of Phlat is the ability to apply custom tags or labels to your stuff–email, office docs, pictures, music, cached web pages, etc. all with the same uniform set of tags. And because these tags aren’t “containers,” you can apply as many tags to as many objects as you like. This is a very powerful, flexible and intuitive mechanism to organize your stuff.”
March 10th, 2007 - 12:26 pm
I ran into this same metadata problem for years. Check this small tool out to add metadata to lots of file types. We are working to develop a code which adds the metadata in multiple metadata formats at once. Why choose iptc, exif, xmp when you can just complete all three at once. Visit www.keyworditall.com.
March 22nd, 2007 - 10:38 pm
Does anyone know how to access this metadata programmatically? also, some filetypes (like .html) don’t show a summary tab on my system. how do you get their summary tab to appear? how do you change the data fields available for each filetype, or create new data fields specific to a new datatype?
March 31st, 2007 - 8:12 pm
Tags have to go in the file because NTFS doesn’t support more than like timestamps and basic attributes (read-only, archive, etc).
If tags go in the file, then the file format has to account for them. Formats like Microsoft Word, JPEG, HTML, etc, all have specific ways to include this information, and Windows explorer was designed to handle each of those formats and display whatever metadata is allowed in them. In other words, each format is unique, and Windows is able to read and write many of them. On the other hand, many formats do not account for things like titles and keywords, which is why you’ll never see that kind of information in a plain text document or a bitmap image.
Newer MAC OSX file systems seem to support metadata beyond timestamps and attributes, but that information is either lost or stored in a separate file when transfered to a windows file system or older MAC system.
The best approach to storing tags, in my opinion, is to just build your own version of explorer where you associate file paths with a database entry. You can also use a file system monitor to update entries when a file is moved (just beware that files moved when the monitor is not active will be disassociated from their entry and their tags will be lost, just like when you move a file and the shortcut no longer works and asks you where it’s at). If you need to send a file somewhere, then the database entry can be sent with it if you make your new explorer capable of connecting and sending files and entries to remote instances of itself. You could even add encryption. The bottom line is that there is no existing universal platform to make tagging easy, so it’s best to build your own and get it on as many machines as you need. That’s just my opinion.
May 4th, 2007 - 8:29 am
This only applies to Microsoft specific files, such as .doc, .xls, etc… It doesn’t work for generic types like .jpg, .gif, .txt.
May 29th, 2007 - 11:59 am
The problem with this method (tagging in XP) is that it relies on NTFS, more precisely alternate data streams (ADS). The summary information gets written “behind” the file - by the way this would be read/write accessible programmatically. But what do you suppose happens when you burn this to CD (or DVD) for backup? Poof! Gone!
It is reason enough for me to agree that tags belong IN the file.
I do have a quick and dirty solution to this tagging thing if you’re interested: Use meaningful filenames! List your tags in the filename of your document. For example, instead of being just “homework.doc” it will be “tagging taxonomy vocabulary research.doc”. Don’t put temporal information (winter 2006) because you can deduce this from the timestamp.
Yes, the filename length is limited (and more limited when burning to CD) but it’s a solution until someone finds something that works, fast.
June 10th, 2007 - 6:14 am
A windows application has been built, to enable users of windows XP and Vista to tag files, emails and urls. Search capabilities are integrated across medias.
It is pre-release mode, very stable based on user’s feedback.
July 15th, 2007 - 12:30 am
I would like to add a comment in Windows XP to the category field to sort my files, what I would like to know is, if I upgrade to Vista will it read that information?
July 17th, 2007 - 10:30 am
I’ve been struggling with my digital library of 40.000 docs for years.
Practically, my great collection of knowledge is largely useless since I have no good way of organizing and hence retrieving relevant information.
I can only dream of the day some basic but effective tagging will become available for the desktop!
July 21st, 2007 - 6:08 pm
Check out this application at http://www.ultrafolder.com. It lets you tag,organize and preview your files on Windows XP.
October 25th, 2007 - 8:09 am
another problem while trying to tag files with Windows XP that i have noticed is that when you fill some categories in the summary tab the size of .jpg increases much more than expected when you add some few words.
a question: does anyone knows a plugin for google desktop that let you index the metadata added with windos in diferent types of files (.jpg, .png, etc, etc)???
November 8th, 2007 - 2:09 pm
Haven’t tried this yet. Sounds interesting, with features like tag clouding, persistent tags,..
http://www.tag2find.com/home.0.html
June 21st, 2008 - 9:35 pm
[…] Tagging files in Windows XP (and why you’ll ditch Google Desktop) […]
July 27th, 2008 - 12:42 pm
tagging files as a meta data will be key to future OS developments. I find tag2find good, but it uses an external database and more portable would be if keywords were used in XP files.
Any tools that can simplify interfaces to access properties of files in XP.