Tag your files and folders using tag2find

Posted on January 14, 2008 at 9:18 am

You cannot escape them, they are turning up everywhere, in clouds, in post footers and in your face, no doubt about it, tagging is as trendy as it comes. I came across an application named tag2find that lets you tag your file system elements, every file and folder.

Now I admit to being a little disorganized when it comes to naming conventions and keeping files in a sensible location. I try I really do, but when I’m busy I tend to save things with names like “asdf” or “qwer” and just hit the ok button letting the application save it in whichever folder it calls home. Now and then I have a tidy up, which means renaming things to something meaningful and moving them to a sensible location. So you can understand why I might think file tagging would help me a heck of a lot.

So I downloaded tag2find and gave it a try, it comes with a non-standard installer, something that always makes me nervous, I don’t like programmers who I have never met stepping outside of the relatively safe MSI system and doing who knows what to my PC.

The second unsavoury surprise was that the application runs as a service with a set of client applications as a front end, once again I was dubious, I don’t want a service installed eating up my system resources when I am not even using it thankyou.

The install completed with no problems and I quickly performed a right click on a file I had sitting on my desktop and chose to tag it, I was surprised when a rather large window opened up.

Here we can see the tagging interface, it seems to work pretty well but I would much prefer to have something smaller open initially, possibly with a control to expand it to the full window. I’m tagging a file, I neither asked or needed to see the tagged file preview window. Anyway, you can see that you add tags over in that odd little pop-over box to the right, the application then previews other files with the same tags over on the left side.

So once I had tagged a file I decided to try and find it again using nothing but tag2find. Here is the search window.

Does that window remind anyone else of Google Talk? And just like Google Talk I can’t stand to look at it. I chose my font, my windows theme, my background and colour scheme because that is the way I want my PC desktop to look. So why do some developers these days decide they know better than me how I like things to appear and go ahead and produce a completely non-standard windows interface? Are they too lazy to make the correct API calls to detect my preferred settings?

My cosmetic gripes aside, you can see that the software did the job, it found a file I had tagged with “image” and it found it instantly. I cannot fault the performance.

While I think file tagging is a great idea I cannot help but feel that tag2find doesn’t do the job in an elegant fashion. It just feels awkward the way this software works, I really did have high hopes that it would be a boon to me in keeping my files organised, instead it just gets in the way for me, I need something like this software but I need it streamlined. I would love to hear our visitors comments about this piece of software, please feel free to bash me if you think I am being too harsh.

This is a guest post by Mac T. Wheeler who is an ex-corporate techie and now earns his living as a copywriter and blogger whilst living in the sunshine.

Technorati Tags: tag,tagging,file system,tag2find,desktop search

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3 Responses to “Tag your files and folders using tag2find”

Madhur Kapoor said on : January 14th, 2008 at 1:05 pm

Great utility buddy. Even i save my files in variety of places. This will be very helpful in organizing them

klein said on : January 14th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

So an appropriate title for this one might have been “Should you Tag your files and folders using tag2find?”

This comes across as a recommendation in the title. Why recommend it if you hate it so?

mwheeler said on : January 14th, 2008 at 8:45 pm

I agree with your comment klein, and that may have been a better title yes.

I don’t hate this piece of software, the concept is a good one and the application works, my problem with it is the fact it just doesn’t do the job efficiently from a usage point of view. I am sure that many people will use it and find the interface acceptable, personally I won’t.

The idea of putting usabilty above functionalty is not a new one but it seems to be something the developers of tag2find have overlooked. They have been very clever for sure, it does a good job of tagging and retrieving using tags, it just doesn’t do it in a way that feels comfortable to me.