Folders no more, instead smart lists (See iTunes and such)

[Azuremen]

Not the best the thread title, but I'm not great at that, as people well know by now.

So, the question is are people moving away from sorting stuff on their own, using folders and such on the computer? With things like iTunes, iPhoto, Adobe's photomanager, Media Library on Win XP, applications are now smart sorting, looking at tags assigned to the file to determine where they should go in "virtual" folders. What this is leading too are single folders with 1000 + unsorted files in them, some without proper ID3 tags or names. Or worse...

This just struck me pretty clearly the other day when I went to grab some music off a room mates computer. I use a drag and drop system on my MP3 player, and I was expecting his music to be in one place... but alas, it was in at least 3 separate folders scattered on the Hard drive - iTunes, My Music, and Shared (From Limewire). In these was primarily an unsorted mess of stuff, which was a pain to look through to find what I wanted.

Maybe I am just a bit old school, but I still like having folders on the hard drive that files sit in that are related. I know I am fairly OCD about folders, as my Music is sorted like so; Music -> Genre -> Sub-Genre (if needed) -> Artist -> Album -> song files. The nice thing is I can just use Windows Explorer to find my musics, rather than relying on some built in Media sorter, which I generally find are memory hogs and clumsy at times, especially if an ID3 tag is off.

Other media and files are beginning to use systems like this, where some search variable filters a heap of unsorted files.

So, what do you think? Do you feel we are going to this system of mass collections that get sorted by software? And what do you think of it and the developing trend of not sorting files with folders? And do I just sound completely crazy and off my rocker?

 

[Sage]

As we accumulate more and more crap (which we are and which we will keep doing), manual organization will become unwieldily. I think the word you’re looking for is metadata – metadata really is the next big thing, I can guarantee you. I’m already transitioning myself: on my Mac, I don’t use the Finder (file browser) very much anymore, but instead I just Spotlight everything. There’s no point in organizing files (which requires one click to get to the file browser, then several clicks through folder hierarchies, assuming I can remember which folders to look in) if I can just press Command+Space, type in the first few letters that are relevant to my file, and poof! it’s there.

Search is the way of the future. I recently cleared out over half of my bookmarks, because I figured that if I ever needed to look at those websites again, I could just Google them. For my email, I always use the built-in Spotlight function instead of using folders. In iTunes, I often look for albums/songs not by using the browser or even playlists, but by searching. On Facebook, I don’t browse for my friends – I just put their first name in the search field. When I’m viewing a PDF, I’m always using the search field (Preview on OS X has a really handy way of showing you the results in a contextually-aware fashion).

More data means that searching becomes the most efficient way. And things like Smart Playlists are nothing more than constant searching mechanisms.

 

[Richardrfo]

I'm a neat freak when it comes to my music so I've got my Music folder set up like this.

Artists -> Artist Name -> Albums & single files
Compilations -> Album name / Series name / Label name -> Album name

Makes it much easier to search for what I want when I want it, but I bung the entire lot into winamp and sort it alphabetically, Artists then Compilations.
Can't stand using WMP as it doesn't seem capable of handling playlists too well and I don't want to keep messing around changing the album playing when I want to change what I'm listening to.

 

[Omnis]

I've been maintaining all of my files via metadata since I began using foobar2000 with its great metadata utility.

The only folders I keep are "dumps". I have my downloads/archives/installers dump, videos dump, my pictures dump, digital camera dump, and then the music dump. Everything else is miscellaneous and just goes in my documents. I think the "sort by type" function is enough organization for each dump. I'd then just use metadata to quickly get what I need out of each pool of files.

Music is especially easy because I can just open the complete dump folder in foobar and it will sort everything automatically for me. Everything without metadata tags can be put into a seperate playlist where I can group the music and tag it accordingly through the utility.

So, really, folders aren't a big deal.

 

[Shannon]

The problem is initially sorting out all your crap. It's no problem for me to go and add new stuff to my neatly arranged music collection, but it was a royal pain in the arse to arrange it initially. I see the same downfall with metadata, in that you have to manually apply the tags (or whatever you want to call them) before the these smart filters actually work. I doubt anyone with a large, messy, untagged collection would rather go through and tag their stuff when they can't be bothered throwing it in folders.

 

[Blake]

The problem is initially sorting out all your crap. It's no problem for me to go and add new stuff to my neatly arranged music collection, but it was a royal pain in the arse to arrange it initially. I see the same downfall with metadata, in that you have to manually apply the tags (or whatever you want to call them) before the these smart filters actually work. I doubt anyone with a large, messy, untagged collection would rather go through and tag their stuff when they can't be bothered throwing it in folders.

This is it, whatever system you decide to use you really have to use it from the start, otherwise converting to that system is a royal pain.

 

[Azuremen]

Yes, the problem is when you get music from friends, etc (by whatever means), they might have a different tagging or file naming structure. Then folders still work, why the metadata fails.

Which I see it do with lots of people that don't have proper ID3 tags, etc, on their music. And it sucks to organize it all, and manual add tags (which I've done before)

 

[BobK]

Actually, I still use directories, works fine for me.

The problem with metadata is you now need an application that can edit the metadata. Yeah they're available, but it becomes one more step in the whole file management process. I like to keep things simple.

 

[Vonie]

iTunes's consolidate library is brilliant.