The death of traditional file names and directories
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In 2009 why do we bother with directory names and traditional file names any more? What would be some alternative ways of organizing things? I was wondering about this because my sister-in-law, people I know at work, and even my parents often struggle with remembering what a file is called, giving poorly chosen names to files and then being unable to find them quickly, and so on. I'm sure others here have had to help family members, or maybe even co-workers find "misplaced" files. Yet one of the things I thought was cool about a Palm Pilot was that you never worried about files, or where things were stored. Why can't this be applied to a PC OS? Why not use a combination of things? Something like tagging to add descriptive bits, a UI that has alphabetic index, like a book. Given that NTFS has many of the features in place to do something like this (Alternate Data Streams would be a perfect place to store meta data, tags, etc) how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this? What other things would be nice to have?
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Companies should bother about this first - then provide it to users. But as long as most of users are way more conservative than OS developer companies - this will not go live soon. We can see how developers create new product - users love it and buy it - developers get revenue and grow. Once company grow too much - it starts making stupid things (like Windows Vista). This is all followed by changing user's preferences. It is business - so once developers feel that fileless system will give them good money - they'll create that.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this?
Well WinFS started long time back and was eventually abandoned. So it might be quite hard.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
f-stop, aperture, dimensions, DPI
And that's helpful how? I can just see my wife thinking; where's that picture of the kids at the beach? I remember it used F/4 at ISO 100...
Or, you just get with the program and buy a mac - iPhoto now automatically recognises people and so you can just ask it to find all the photos containing uncle jim (of course, you won't get any photos of his back that way...) Actually, good search is the key - once you have that then you've got the keywords included automatically.
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Or, you do what I do and a) copy all files from the camera into a folder with the date the copy was made (i.e. 2009_07_01) and b) rename the good pictures with the date, who is in them and where it's at. (Automatic index results would be interesting. I wonder how it would index the pictures of my kids at the beach [in San Diego a month ago] since the beach isn't in several of the pictures. Moreover, there were multiple beaches. Even then I'm not sure it's a help. To my wife, the two main beaches were "The Hotel Beach" and "The Other One." To me, they were "The Bahia Beach" and "Pacific Beach." To my kids they were "The Boring Beach" and "The one with the waves.")
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 4:33 PM
That's pretty much what I do as well - though I've recently started geotagging* photos now, so I can locate ones specific to a particular area visually using online mapping if I need to (that's the theory anyway - in practice Flickr's mapping is a bit lacking). I also tend to add a text file with more details of the contents of each picture in the same folder. * I use a TrackStick II[^] for the automated stuff and GeoSetter[^] for manual positioning. I suspect that's a topic for another discussion, though!
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In 2009 why do we bother with directory names and traditional file names any more? What would be some alternative ways of organizing things? I was wondering about this because my sister-in-law, people I know at work, and even my parents often struggle with remembering what a file is called, giving poorly chosen names to files and then being unable to find them quickly, and so on. I'm sure others here have had to help family members, or maybe even co-workers find "misplaced" files. Yet one of the things I thought was cool about a Palm Pilot was that you never worried about files, or where things were stored. Why can't this be applied to a PC OS? Why not use a combination of things? Something like tagging to add descriptive bits, a UI that has alphabetic index, like a book. Given that NTFS has many of the features in place to do something like this (Alternate Data Streams would be a perfect place to store meta data, tags, etc) how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this? What other things would be nice to have?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
If you put this back into the real world for a moment imagine that you dump a load of random documents, photos and other files on a desk, then employ a maid to come along and clear it all up for you. The maid isn't necessarily going to have any idea about who you are or what you do, so they're not going to do a particularly great job at organising it and you're going to have no idea as to where they put it. As the self-balancing binary tree teaches us, if you want to find something there's no better way to do so than to organise yourself first.
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
can't (with current (software) technologies) be done mechanistically IMO.
There are some articles on CP and another that Joe mentions (further down) that suggest otherwise. I find it difficult to believe that some basic, though still really useful, analysis can't be done at this point in time.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
And even without advanced analysis, a lot can be done. The OS already saves the date when a file was created/edited - which could be used to sort results by date or to search for files that were stored at a certain date. File types are also trivial to determine. It could save some more info, like which application created it, or which website a file was downloaded from, or where it was copied from (usb stick / digital camera / ...). Some file formats have their own information tags as well, for example, an mp3 file knows the album and author - things a good search engine could work on. I agree with you, Jim. Naming files and putting them in the right folders shouldn't be necessary. Even though there are people that organize their files, there are far more which don't. And it would be great if we didn't have to.
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Or, you do what I do and a) copy all files from the camera into a folder with the date the copy was made (i.e. 2009_07_01) and b) rename the good pictures with the date, who is in them and where it's at. (Automatic index results would be interesting. I wonder how it would index the pictures of my kids at the beach [in San Diego a month ago] since the beach isn't in several of the pictures. Moreover, there were multiple beaches. Even then I'm not sure it's a help. To my wife, the two main beaches were "The Hotel Beach" and "The Other One." To me, they were "The Bahia Beach" and "Pacific Beach." To my kids they were "The Boring Beach" and "The one with the waves.")
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 4:33 PM
@Joe Hey, about picture tagging, forget about dates as folder names and do yourself a favor: install Picasa from Google. This little programm will perform the search for you. In a future version, it may get face recognition, so no more name-tagging.
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In 2009 why do we bother with directory names and traditional file names any more? What would be some alternative ways of organizing things? I was wondering about this because my sister-in-law, people I know at work, and even my parents often struggle with remembering what a file is called, giving poorly chosen names to files and then being unable to find them quickly, and so on. I'm sure others here have had to help family members, or maybe even co-workers find "misplaced" files. Yet one of the things I thought was cool about a Palm Pilot was that you never worried about files, or where things were stored. Why can't this be applied to a PC OS? Why not use a combination of things? Something like tagging to add descriptive bits, a UI that has alphabetic index, like a book. Given that NTFS has many of the features in place to do something like this (Alternate Data Streams would be a perfect place to store meta data, tags, etc) how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this? What other things would be nice to have?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
@Jim You could install Windows Vista. It has an integrated search engine. Just click the orb, type in your tags and click on the right file. Doesn't this work for you ? For photos, use Picasa from Google. It is free. They are making a mac version of it now.
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In 2009 why do we bother with directory names and traditional file names any more? What would be some alternative ways of organizing things? I was wondering about this because my sister-in-law, people I know at work, and even my parents often struggle with remembering what a file is called, giving poorly chosen names to files and then being unable to find them quickly, and so on. I'm sure others here have had to help family members, or maybe even co-workers find "misplaced" files. Yet one of the things I thought was cool about a Palm Pilot was that you never worried about files, or where things were stored. Why can't this be applied to a PC OS? Why not use a combination of things? Something like tagging to add descriptive bits, a UI that has alphabetic index, like a book. Given that NTFS has many of the features in place to do something like this (Alternate Data Streams would be a perfect place to store meta data, tags, etc) how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this? What other things would be nice to have?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Well, let me see.... Windows file search was broken in late Win 9x, up to and including Windows XP. (not enough experience with Vista) Windows has very complex rules where which files should be stored, the names of system folders have changed with every release, so even a willing amateur can't easily tell which folders belong to the user, and which to the OS. Win the "new styles" (9x+), the Open/Save File dialog does no longer show the full path of a file - a good thing given the default location of a users files, a bad thing in the greater schemes. ------- MS' Index Service is generally not such a bad idea, but its limited support for file formats and Windows Search's blind trust on its results makes files badly discoverable. But using alternate streams? Dude, CDFS. SAMBA file servers.
Jim Crafton wrote:
What other things would be nice to have?
A functional "Search", for starters?
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@Joe Hey, about picture tagging, forget about dates as folder names and do yourself a favor: install Picasa from Google. This little programm will perform the search for you. In a future version, it may get face recognition, so no more name-tagging.
Oh, come on guys! When files are created or moved, relevant dates are already recorded for the files. The real problem is that we have no quick way to expose meta and relationships through a search index. The closest anybody has come to implementing it is 'Spotlight' on Mac OS X. Seriously, our filesystems are the root of the problem: indexing eats the harddrive, it eats the processor on some PCs, and it eats the RAM... all because our filesystems aren't dynamic enough.
Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude
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Heck no! At least not on my system. I don't care what crutches other people need. It's bad enough they allow SPACEs in names, and don't get me started on case-sensitivity! :mad:
modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 5:20 PM
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Jim Crafton wrote:
I'm sure there are AI projects out there that can scan a text file and give you some clues to it's content
This? http://www.aspenbusinesssystems.com/pages/detpages/xeroxnews909.shtml[^] A friend who is a computational linguist helped write an email categorizer for Inxight, which is now owned by SAP. He's partners in another company that breaks down and categorizes resumes. One issue, though, is that all these assumes correct original information. The irony is that the very people who could use this type of technology would probably have no idea how to even if it existed.
How about a completely new design for a filesystem? There are already a number of semantic ideas for filesystem i.e. the intelligently half-cooked SemFS and the still yet-to-be-delivered WinFS. What some people need to do (i.e. ME) is get off our bums and work out a truly workable semantic filesystem that actually works in the real world. "It would essentially be a journaled relational filesystem, removing the need for a relational db index and exposing all metadata as well as relationships according to filetype, while maintaining the attributes of traditional filesystems." 1[^]
Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude
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Jim Crafton wrote:
how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this?
Well WinFS started long time back and was eventually abandoned. So it might be quite hard.
(see subject line)
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(see subject line)
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Or, you just get with the program and buy a mac - iPhoto now automatically recognises people and so you can just ask it to find all the photos containing uncle jim (of course, you won't get any photos of his back that way...) Actually, good search is the key - once you have that then you've got the keywords included automatically.
Picasa allegedly does this, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. It may only work with online albums.
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@Joe Hey, about picture tagging, forget about dates as folder names and do yourself a favor: install Picasa from Google. This little programm will perform the search for you. In a future version, it may get face recognition, so no more name-tagging.
I really don't like Picasa. Can't exactly explain why, it just irritates me. I'm not the one struggling with finding photos. I dump them on my hard drive according to the date. I then rename the best and drop them into a directory of family photos. In a given year, one of my kids or grandkids may get a dozen photos added to their collection. Another two dozen may get added to the general "family" folder. My screen saver then "plays" them (though not the originals.) I'm simply doing what I already did with physical photos, only without renaming. (I have a box of "raw" photos and albums for each kid and a general family album. The albums stop around 2004 when I switched to all digital.)
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How about a completely new design for a filesystem? There are already a number of semantic ideas for filesystem i.e. the intelligently half-cooked SemFS and the still yet-to-be-delivered WinFS. What some people need to do (i.e. ME) is get off our bums and work out a truly workable semantic filesystem that actually works in the real world. "It would essentially be a journaled relational filesystem, removing the need for a relational db index and exposing all metadata as well as relationships according to filetype, while maintaining the attributes of traditional filesystems." 1[^]
Carpe Diem la Iesous, Aaron, ComposerDude
I think it's a giant waste of time. It solves a problem that doesn't exist for most people. When the main examples you can come up with for why you need a new file system is that it helps you organize your photos and MP3s better, that's pathetic. If you are interested about such things (I don't) then you use a media player with a library and something like Picasa. (A big problem with these "metadata" systems is they require you to do a lot of manual entry. Since most human beings are find with a single title and a simple alphabetic system to sort them, there is no selling point for your average consumer.)
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In 2009 why do we bother with directory names and traditional file names any more? What would be some alternative ways of organizing things? I was wondering about this because my sister-in-law, people I know at work, and even my parents often struggle with remembering what a file is called, giving poorly chosen names to files and then being unable to find them quickly, and so on. I'm sure others here have had to help family members, or maybe even co-workers find "misplaced" files. Yet one of the things I thought was cool about a Palm Pilot was that you never worried about files, or where things were stored. Why can't this be applied to a PC OS? Why not use a combination of things? Something like tagging to add descriptive bits, a UI that has alphabetic index, like a book. Given that NTFS has many of the features in place to do something like this (Alternate Data Streams would be a perfect place to store meta data, tags, etc) how hard would it be to write something that might accomplish this? What other things would be nice to have?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
In the last decade there was a piece of word processing software called Yeah Write[^] that named its own files and gave the user a reference to the first line of the document in a file cabinet interface. All you needed to know was what the file was about not its name. It was written by the people who developed WordPerfect who left the company over a dispute about the direction the comapny was taking.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
And honestly, with all the horsepower that a modern PC has, couldn't we come up with something easier?
Would adding metadata actually be any easier? You need some way of adding the semantic information for the file to the raw data - adding in the human interpretation of that data. File path, metadata - it all takes human effort - can't (with current (software) technologies) be done mechanistically IMO. I would love to be proven wrong, however :-)
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This is an interesting discussion. I agree that the current system of filenames is a somewhat broken experience for most users. I think MP3 music files are a good example of possible future directions. Most MP3 players these days don't even show filenames. They present files in a way that is intuitive to users and with multiple views: album lists, artist lists, genre lists, custom play lists, etc. Ideally the OS should organize files by file type with multiple sorts available based on metadata common for that file type, like MP3 players do. Generally the problem with photos is the lack of location data and event data (Jimmy's birthday). GPS in cameras will help fix the first problem. The second can probably be figured out by the date. Most of the photo organizing programs can show you a view of your photos by date, which I think works pretty well for most people. What we need the OS to do is to organize our files like the MP3 and photo organizing programs do. Windows Explorer sort of does this, but only on the folder level. And Windows tries to organize files by type with predefined folders like MyDocuments and MyPictures, but these are only superficial. I should be able to easily see a complete list of all my Word documents on my computer (along with excerpts) without a massive search of my hard drive. I think the other key ingredient is to distinguish user files from program files. When I want to see a list of my Word documents, I don't want to see every ReadMe.doc file on my computer. Same goes of image files, etc.