On Tags

Would it be a good idea if tags replaced folders? Could tags replace folders? The three online storage systems I have been investigating over the last while (Gmail, Flickr and Del.icio.us) are all using tags to classify content. Having gotten used to the multi-faceted nature of the tagging method, I now find myself wishing to be able to implement the same idea on my desktop and in our studio workflow. Within the companies I have worked for, the standard design studio working-folder hierarchy has been in place since the early nineties at least. Being broadly: a master ‘Current Clients’ folder; then individual folders for ‘Job Name and Number’ (say 9999); and then nested within those 9999 Admin; 9999 Design; 9999 PDF Proofs; 9999 Production and 9999 Text.  This is a tried and tested system that works fine for everything that falls within the standard studio workflow. But any extra files on your hard drive which fall outside of the norm do tend to gravitate towards the slushpile. It seems to me that some way of implementing tags on all that additional material would be helpful, as the tagging methodology does seem to work well with messy unstructured datasets.

Come to think of it, if Blogger would only implement a tagging system, then I could have tagged this post as: Design; Nerd; Filing; Interface.

Flickr Presence

Once I started to gather together all of the digital photos which I had stashed away throughout my work Mac’s hard drives, I was taken aback by how many of them there actually were. Especially given that this is only a subset of whatever total amount is on the big drive at home. So uploading from this lot onto Flickr, I hit the monthly allocated memory ceiling pretty quickly. But I guess this is how they entice you into forking out some of your hard-earned to become a Pro-Account user. The ease of use and the Flickr featureset makes this quite an attractive offer, but I will have to take a pass on it at this stage. For two reasons: whatever impending Tribble-related financial shennigans I will be experiencing in July, and the fact that my piecacrap Explorer 5 and System 9.2 combo here at work means I cannot access most of the really useful Flickr tools from the studio anyhow.  Twenty megs a month will have to do me for now.

On a related note, one interesting quirk to the Vodafone billing system I have discovered in my Flickr-related tinkering is that while they charge me thirty to forty cents when I send a cameraphone image as a Picture Message, if I email the same image to Flickr from my moble it is free-gratis (indicated as ‘Photo Album’ on my bill). This is even though a text-based email comes out of my monthly kilobytes of GPRS allocation. I need to look into this further.