The death of traditional file names and directories
-
UH8LNGFN.TOO?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
WITHIN_REASON.ISOK "This is the spreadsheet for my expenses during my trip to San Francisco in July 2009.xls" X|
-
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)
-
(see subject line)
-
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.
-
@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.)
-
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.)
-
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.
-
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 :-)
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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.
-
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.
Heh - I never thought of MP3 files - and that's the one case where the infrastructure is really well established. How many times do you have to enter tags to audio files? In my experience, once or twice in a thousand CDs. But a) someone has entered all the metadata, and b) the underlying information is relatively easily indexed and well known. It is a good example, though - I know that there's no relationship between the layout of files on my iPod (did you expect anything other than an Apple MP3 player from me :-)) and what I see in the menus.
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
-
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
I absolutely agree that most users just don't know what to do when it comes to naming files and organising folders, plenty don't even know how to create a folder. So why let them? It's time for the file system to be a bit more clever (or at least its presentation). I've often found myself using "Recent files" through explorer to find what I'm after. Because I know I can find what I was working on in comparison (chronologically) with other items that I was working on. And yet that's a way of looking at files that's fairly hard for most users to get to. What I think most users would find appealing is something that flashes up at the time they save a file presenting them with a list of tags that the system could identify for itself and asking them to confirm or edit.
I just love Koalas - they go great with Bacon.
-
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
After reading this I pictured like a google for the os. So really all you need is a bot to crawl through your computer and track everything. The search in windows might be able to do something like this or maybe some one knows of an article were they modified the search to have bots. If so let me know.
-
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 your "users" are image centric, ie they generate lots of pics & clips with their digicams & camiphones they should take a look at Picasa - its pretty good for non-professionals, its free, its not moribund and has some end user glitz. Beyond Picasa the Digital Asset Management (DAM) apps do much of what you're seeking, but not in the manner you suggest. They are primarily image centric but some do a reasonable job with sound & video, not so good with other data forms (wp, ss, pdfs, presentations etc). Examples are ACDSee Pro, Media Expression, Extensis Portfolio, PhotoMechanic, IMatch, Breeze Systems - that list is nowhere near complete and they are payware. Meta data is nearly always stored twice, in some sort of indexing database for performance and with the data for portability, recoverability & interoperability. Latter is either embedded in the files alongside the artistic content, where its written into industry standard blocks (EXIF, IPTC etc); or its stored in external "sidecar/companion" files also in industry standard blocks. Most meta data is gradually migrating towards XMP. All apps must be able to read & write all data because professionals invariably use a plethora of apps & tools to manipulate and manage their data, and often on multiple platforms (e.g. Windows for photo editing, Mac for Cataloguing, Unix for Workflow and Accounting). Some file formats (e.g. camera RAW) have limited ability to embed meta data, thus the sidecar files. Meta data could be put into ADS's to eliminate sidecars, but platform portability and application interoperability are a challenge. There's a school of thought that maintains meta data should not be embedded in same file as the artistic data. A badly written meta data manipulator might scribble on the artistic data, obviously the converse also true. Artistic data manipulators (e.g. Photoshop, Media Composer etc) shouldn't have to pussy foot around a raft of meta data blocks, that are forever proliferating in number, content and format. Meta data manipulators (GeoSetter, EXIFTool etc) shouldn't be concerned with the artistic content format (jpeg, tiff, bmp, mpeg, avi etc). Another issue in this space is versioning, professionals like to retain the original object and the output of each editing session. I don't thinks there are any standards, different apps use different schemes (assuming they address the issue at all), they all seem to proliferate more files and more directories. This is another area where ADS's might be used to good effec
-
The items of useful automatic analysis I've seen personally:
- Named facial recognition in iPhoto (I'm sure it's in other photo cataloguers as well - iPhoto's the one I use, though) - works pretty well, but relies on a pretty big corpus of previous, (mostly manually) marked up photos. Still pretty impressive
- Search engines (Google, obviously, and Spotlight).
Other than that, not so much
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
In winda's Locate32 is useful, quicker than native searcher, only searches file/folder names. I index every file (1.1M), updates every hour, takes a 2-3 minutes at low priority, can search whilst updating, has shell integration. Windows, Google, Copernic all spat the dummy and are tooooo slooooow with that many files, even when contents aren't indexed Yahoo Search tool was excellent, but I lost it and then discovered some hooligan over in sunnyvale had buried it.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)