folders are more convenient because they are part of the file system. there is no ls by tag or even a gui filemanager that shows files by tag. that's one reason why tags need to be part of the filesystem, because if they are not, then most filemanagers would not support them.

and technically, file extensions are kind of like tags. and it's really ugly that they are in the filename string. that messes up a lot of things. it would be better if they were proper tags independent of the name. so you can rename a file without changing the tags, similar to the problem with EXIF.

or more importantly, you could reference a file without that reference depending on the tags of the file. your jpg/jpeg example is also a problem caused by this situation. it would go away with proper tags

macOS does store tags in the filesystem (which you can access using xattr at the command line) but I have no earthly idea how you find files by tag or really do anything with them.

The master tag list seems to be Finder-specific preference data though.

This is an example I use to find photos I've stripped the exif data from and tagged:

    mdfind -onlyin . 'kMDItemUserTags=exif-stripped'

ohhh thanks, this is something I needed to know.

linux has xattr too. so technically, our filesystems already support tags.

that means it is now up to the other tools to catch up and make use of them.

here is a discussion about tags and extended attributes in gnome. https://blog.chipx86.com/2005/12/07/tagging-and-the-gnome-de...

it is from 2005, so not really current, but the arguments are interesting.

in short: filesystem attributes are systemwide (but you and i may want to have different tags on the same shared file) and the user needs to have permission on the files, so you can't tag files that you can read but can't change.

i believe these issues are solvable, esp. the latter would work if we have permissions to add tags but not the content of a file. (like you can rename a file even if you don't have write permission to the file)

xattrs can certainly be used to store tagging info. There are a couple major problems with them though. 1) xattrs are not supported by all file systems and they are not enabled by default in some. If you copy a file with xattrs from one file system to another that either doesn't support them or didn't enable their use, then your xattrs are thrown away in the copy. 2)Searching for files based on xattrs in a large folder tree (e.g. several million files across thousands of folders) is exceptionally slow by nature.

right, but the alternative is no support for tags at all, so xattr gets us halfway there, and filesystems that don't have it need to keep up.

searching can be sped up by building an index. apps that want to use tags will need to do that, just like they build an index of files already. because searching filenames is also slow.

a version of locatedb that supports xattr would help for example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search

> Plus, this is how we organise [0] stuff in real life.

The way I organize people I know and places and all sorts of other entities I cannot physically place into boxes and folders is a lot more like the tag approach, though.

Oh really? I've got a few boxes of guys stored away and, like Mitt Romney, binders full of women.

(*ba-doom-tish* for the-in-retrospect much-maligned Mitt Romney on this day)