Down the rabbithole - Finder tags

Making tagging easier (Go back)

It's fairly easy, though not immediately obvious how, to tag files in Mac OS. In the Finder, if you bring up the information window (⌘-I) for a file you will see something like this:

To add a tag, click in the Add Tags... field and start typing. An auto-complete window allows you either to choose an existing tag (saves on duplication of tags, which is a Very Good Thing) or create a new one. In this case I chose "Mac". Hitting return results in a tile in this window. This is how it looks after adding a few tags.

This is fine, and it is all that Devonthink needs, but to me it feels a little underwhelming. As I mentioned earlier, the use of keyword tags is a very fragile mechanism for classifying content. You'll see in the screenshot above that I've used Java as a keyword tag. Is that Java the country, Java the type of coffee or Java the programming language, or indeed some other Java entirely? There is no context to distinguish these keywords, because they are just strings of text. So unless you can add that context (you're a human, and the article is about software development, so we know which Java we're talking about) the keyword is a little wasted. Worse, it can be misleading; if I had documents (say, in Devonthink) that were separately about Java the country, Java the coffee bean variety and Java the programming language, they might all be tagged with the keyword Java, with predictably hilarious results when navigating by tag.

Properly designed and used, though, tagging (I prefer the word classification) using structured information taxonomies is a very effective and powerful information tool. It gives precision, flexibiilty and accuracy to your information architecture, and removes ambiguity. Most important, it gives context; by which I mean the environmental information that positions your content in relation to other content.