Tagging help... how best to build a list of tags... looking for precedents

[joefaber]

Hi there,
I’ve got my scanscnap ix500 sitting here and MacSparky paperless iBook and a copy of Hazel and am all set to jump in and embrace the paperless workflow… except for one little thing… tags…

Anyone have recommendations about how best to come up with a list of tags? Or a list available to borrow from and customize? I don’t want to get into ISO dates, but instead am trying to avoid reinventing the wheel when it comes to tag lists. But maybe this is silly since every person is different… a distinct possibility. In which case, maybe the question is whether anyone has suggestions about how best to build a list of tags… Mindnode brainstorms? Or just start somewhere and then refine over time?

[justindirose]

I am an advocate of letting your tag list naturally develop over time. Start with your current needs. Then once your system breaks and a tag doesn’t accurately describe the item you’re tagging, add more tags to meet the needs you have for that information.

It would be ideal to have this on a regular review cycle, too, so you can clean up (merge, rename, delete) tags that may need adjusting.

[rkv]

I don’t have specific tags to recommend. I think the specific words have to be personal, but there will likely be common categories of tags.

If you haven’t already, listen to mpu 390 with Brett Terpstra. Also, read the links in the show notes particularly Brett’s.

I use Brett’s Hazel & Ruby scripts for automatic filing of tagged items from the desktop. As a result all my tags start with a colon (“:”). So all my tags are of the format :tagstring. This has the advantage that you can imbed tags in any data store which has text, even if it doesn’t explicitly support tags, and spotlight, launchbar, and the like can find your tagged items. In all other uses of a colon in general text entry I am always following the colon with a space, so miscellaneous documents don’t tend to show up in my tag searches.

As a result of adopting Brett’s tools and methodology, I have also moved toward having much shallower folder structures than I used to maintain. I am really liking that. It’s much simpler to find things and stay organised.

[ibuys]

My tagging system grew from my old hierarchical filesystem. Currently I have three folders in my Documents folder

• Action - Stuff I need to deal with
• Working - Stuff I am dealing with
• Archive - Stuff I’m no longer dealing with, but want to keep anyway.

Inside each folder are all my files, no more nested folders. My Archive folder is fairly good sized. Before I had a filesystem that looked more like this:

Documents

• Personal
  • School
  • Home
  • Kids
  • Vehicles
• Finance
  • Bills
    • water
    • power
    • water
  • Insurance
    • health
    • dental
    • life
    • auto
    • home
  • Receipts
  • Statements
    • bank 1
    • bank 2
      • 1999
      • 2000
      • 2001
    • Insurance company
• Work
  • Project
  • Reviews
  • Another Project

You get the picture. The thing is, sometimes things should go in two folders, like insurance statements, should those go under “insurance” or under “Statement/Insurance”? I finally got tired of the endlessly recursive hierarchy and converted all the folder names to tags.

So, now I’ve got tag names like “Finance”, “Bills”, & “Water” applied to my scanned water bill, and “Finance”, “Insurance”, “Statements”, & “Life” applied to my life insurance statement. Everything gets tagged and filed into the Archive folder by Hazel after scanning and OCR.

Now it’s no big deal if a particular file should exist in two places because those places are just tags, and I can apply as many tags as I want. Search works great for finding files, but so does the Finder’s “Tags” section in the sidebar. Combining the two I can always find exactly what I need.

One place to look, one place to backup, one place to file everything that I want to keep.

[sylumer]

Have a think about what you are going to use the tags for. Also if others will reference the files would their requirements be different?

A Folksonomy (free format tagging as you go) helps with searching where you would tags file with anything you might reasonably search on and want that file returning; often excluding any text or meta data content that would be found instead - I.e. Avoid duplicating as a tag when it exists as file data already.

A Taxonomy (strict, predefined tags) helps with grouping for filtering since you are effectively categorising like you might with a file structure, except tagging is not beholding to hierarchical structure or duplicate association to a single source - I.e. a file exists in one folder but can exist in many groups as defined by many tags.

Beyond that it really is your choice. Is it for work, home, hobby, voluntering/charity, all of the above, something else…? The choice of what you might use to tag with is dependent upon the topic areas being covered and what makes sense to everyone who might need to use them.

[D_Rehak]

Relistened to Podcast again on tagging.

Resurrected a decade-old program “LEAP” that still from what I can see is the best tagging software utility

LEAP

This is a handy program that also maps all tags in a keyword diagram with size of the tag corresponding to the number of times used in the files.

Hoovering over Tags displays the number of times used

[Dingens]

Hey

Sorry for bumping this up, but I am about to go the same route here. I have Hazel and was wondering how you made Hazel do this:

Blockquote Everything gets tagged and filed into the Archive folder by Hazel after scanning and OCR.
Thanks
Rolf

[ibuys]

I don’t have Hazel installed on this Mac, so I don’t have any screenshots to share. Basically I’d have it monitor my “Action” folder for new files, and I setup a whole bunch of rules. The rules would scan the content of the PDF for certain keywords, like “City” “Water” and “Date Due” together would be my water bill. Then I’d set Hazel to take three actions:

1. Rename the file with the current date and the type of file, like 2023-04-04_water-bill.pdf.
2. Tag the bill with Finder tags “Finances”, “Bills”, and “Water”.
3. Move the file to the Archive folder.

[Dingens]

Thanks, yes, this is what I was hoping to do as well. I find often that automatic rules are not enough and I have to add tags manually depending on the file. Was hoping to find a quicker way to assign tags…
If you have the time later on and feel like it, it would be interesting to see you rules, but no rush, I know we are all pretty busy.
Cheers
Rolf

[OogieM]

@Dingens

Sorry for bumping this up,

I’m actually glad you did, I’m going through my system as I cahnge major tools and revisiting tagging is an important part.

First off I am not generally a tagger of files I use tags in specific applications where they serve a specific purpose. Tags on files do not carry across all operating systems so I don’t use them.

Before you can come up with a list of tags think how you will use them. Are they for process, for location, for subject, for time sequence or something else?

Think about how you first start to look for something that you know you have but can’t find.

What types of things do you use for searching?

For example: My Lightroom database has several sets of tags, one is based on process, where in the photo intake process I am so that I can easily pull out photos that have a specific next task to be done on them. (@needsKeywords, @needsName), Another set is based on Geography, loosly based on the official geographich placenames database geographic names but hierarchical with country, state, city, address or feature as the tree. (United_States/Colorado/Paonia/Garvin_Mesa/red_barn) Another is taxonomy of the animals (ANIMAL/ovine/domestic_sheep/Breed_BWMS/Desert_Weyr_Tiberius)

For files I don’t tag, I use locations in folders to find them but they could easily be tags. So I have Bank_Statements-Personal or Sheep-Guard_Dogs as folders and the files are there.

Where I am really starting to use tags now is in Obsidian.

I use tags for status on projects (project/active, project/archive, project/hold) for contexts on tasks (Context/OutsideWithHelp Context/Phone) I have a few I use to gather notes into a group (emergency, Household_Inventory) with MOC type notes that pull those items together in a list of documents using dataview queries.

I use Hazel to move stuff into folders but I don’t try to tag anything using Hazel.

[Dingens]

Thanks.
I am running into the typical folder issue:
Statements will go into the statements folder, but some are also need for taxes, others a re family related and again other house or car related.
I end up having duplicates of files in the tax folder, for examples that goes to my accountant. And when I get the results of the tax man, will they go into finances-tax or into the folder I have the accountant? You get the idea.
So figured tags or a database solution like Devonthink is the way forward. Since I need all my files in the Dropbox so that my wife can access them and so that I can access them at my windows PC at work.
I realise tags won’t show up on Windows, bu the Mac is the main computer for both my wife and myself.
Cheers
Rolf

[ibuys]

Here’s a basic example, this just files away an Amazon receipt:

I try to keep things as simple as possible.

[OogieM]

@Dingens

Statements will go into the statements folder, but some are also need for taxes, others a re family related and again other house or car related.
I end up having duplicates of files in the tax folder, for examples that goes to my accountant. And when I get the results of the tax man, will they go into finances-tax or into the folder I have the accountant?

Well in my world during the yearly financial statements go into their official statement folders based on financial institution by year.(main_bank/2022_Statements) Our accountant has a secure file upload place so I upload the files to that location for taxes. Scanned 1099 or other forms that come in as paper also go there and go into the tax return folder for the year. When the taxes are done the final scanned tax reurns go into the tax year folder. See, I never think to look for bank statements in a tax year folder so I don’t file them there. They are supporting material for taxes but not the tax returns themselves. I never have duplicate files anyplace. If I had to I guess I’d make a file with a list of links to the locations but in practice I never need to do that.