One of those 'Why haven't they done this?' topics

I would have thought it would be easy, at an OS level, to add whatever metadata you like to any file. So often, file naming becomes nightmarish because you want to put loads of info in the title. But what if you could add, say, a 'People = ...' bit of metadata to any type of file, that could be read by the OS, so you could search for every file on your PC or Mac to do with a certain person? Or with work, you could add all kinds of reference numbers, and manage different types of data all from the OS. Maybe do it with XML or something so that any application could read the data.

Uhm, you can do that in WinXP if you right-click on a file and select 'Properties'.

Can you add custom fields? This is news to me! I must investigate...

You can't add custom fields but also I don't think you can search on the specific fields there. The windows find files just lets you search the file name of for text found in a file, there are no options to search "author" or "keywords" or "comments" or whatever.

Ah, I see you can add 'spotlight comments' to a file in OSX, but that's not the same as adding custom fields, which would show up as columns in a Finder window and which you could sort/filter by; and I'll bet they don't survive transition to WinXP and back. Still, interesting.

I think it would be easy to add this to the OS. I would be surprised if there ain't already some 3rd party extension like that.

There isn't. Read "About Face" by alan cooper (You know, father of visual basic?) and you'll see.. Not about face 2.0 the first one. It was written in like 1995 and details something even better than what you want.

It is something a lot of people have wanted for a LONG time. None of the big OSs will impliment it.

Think about it. Wasn't in NT, wasn't in 98, 2000, XP... Nothing. Not even a half-ass attempt.

google desktop is the closest you can get and it is nothing like what it should be.

Such a feature was originally going to be in Vista, wasn't it? Of course, it got canned along with the rest of the innovative ideas.

you mean the innovative for 1995 ideas. It's been more than 10 years and we still have to remember where we put things, and what they are called. That is rediculous. It was bad when we has 100-1000 files. It is worse now that we have 1000-100,000 files. It is almost unbareable. And there is no good way to arange things in files. Do I go by genre then artist, or by year and then artist. Year-genre-artist or genre-year-artist. It is a waste of time and effort when all the files SAY what year, genre, artist and other things the files are. Mp3s HAVE tags. Why can't my computer arange by them.. ARGH!

I beleive this is what MS wants to do with WinFS. It was stripped from the Vista release, but I think it is still in the works as an add on.

It should have been in the works as a replacement for the file system entirely.

Why do we need folders with a system like this. It could all be stored in one directory. Things don't even need filenames anymore, if you want to get technical.

www.skyos.org ;)

edit - for those who want to have a closer look at how it looks like, http://www.skyos.org/media/videos/mediastation/presentation.html

Many year ago I was reading about Windows hook to the fopen function...my idea was: when an application calls the fopen a little program intercepts this and ask the user to insert meta-tags (stored on the hd).
Then when you need to look for your file use a query-prog to find the info...
The conceptual problem: when you delete the files (or the folder) you lose the info...and of course my natural incapacity to prorgram something like this (maybe with Bmax it's possible to create an application, running it like a service, and create some 'virtual folders' ala Vista)...
Just speculating...

skyos is getting closer. But you still have to see these long useless locations by folder things. And there is no sorting ability on the music that I saw. There should be a sorting ability on everything. But this illustrates how it could work. Now imagine the same thing, only with meaningful names on things like "Song Title : Artist" or "Some name I gave my text file" or "Name of movie" and also the ability to sort the lists by any of the many tags.

and resort any way you like. Say. First by date created, then by genre and watch all the scifi movies you have in the order they were created.. Or listen to all the metal in the order it was created. Then you start to understand the power in that.

Already been done, Amiga OS had it, but people decided they didn't want any of that. Probably made far too much sense for most folks to be able to cope with it.

well. Outside the UK no one knows what an amiga is. When you talk about joe-no-one on the street I mean. Sure us nerds know... but not out there.

While I agree meta-tags would be very nice, I don't think it makes sense to get rid of the folder hierarchy of arrangement. Having both let's you group things either related to their format/data/meta-tags or according to their logical group (i.e. a folder for a game with all of it's related files in subfolders.)

Programmers and competent computer users are comfortable with the file/folder system. It is a terrible system, and you lock yourself into it willingly. The file/folder system isn't about physical space, the same can be accomplished with having a meta-tag specificly for the game, and for all it's parts. It can be better controled, and even more meaningful than folders are.