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[xplorer˛] — File notes
home » blog » 6 June 2010 |
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Nowadays everything from online picture and video sharing to blogging is driven by tags. You can't organize online content in folders like in your local computer, so the next best thing is to assign descriptions to pictures and articles. Little baby pictures are tagged as baby; family and wedding pictures with wedding; family. Then if you want all your family pictures you just search for the family tag. You get the picture (no pun intended).
| Tags are nice for categorizing documents of all types, but as of late (vista and later) windows explorer doesn't allow you to add tags or descriptions to any file type. Once upon a time there was a summary information tab in the file property sheet. Now in the windows 7 era tagging is inconsistent as you can see from the pic to the right. Most image file types will not accept a comment or tag (e.g. BMP, GIF, PNG) but you can add tags to JPG. Likewise for videos, there's no way to add comments to AVI files. Unless you convert all your pictures to JPG there is no way to do tag-based management of your photos with windows explorer. |
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xplorer˛ on the other hand can add comments to all* file types and for all NT based windows operating systems (2000 and later, including vista and 7). Use Actions > Set comment menu command to add a description (note) and/or one or more tags to any picture, video or generic document. Then you can use comment (tag) rules to locate, filter and select files that match a tag. See how this works in today's demo video 
xplorer˛ stores comments within the file (literally for structured storage files like office documents, and using parallel streams for other types). It doesn't need separate files like descript.ion and such for the comments. When you move files around your hard disk the comments are moved along like any integral part of the file.
* xplorer˛ can add comments to all files on NTFS formatted partitions. If you want to copy such files onto FAT storage (e.g. USB stick) that doesn't support parallel streams without losing the comments, you can use Actions > ADS > Bundle to go menu command.
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