Not necessarily. Missing or misspelled tags could be discovered just like a row in a database that has a column value that is missing or misspelled can be. For example if you want all your photos to have a 'Year' tag attached for when the photo is taken, just query for all photos WHERE 'Year = NULL'. The same goes for values like names. If you see that you have 10,000 files that have 'Name = Karl' attached but only one that has 'Name = Kral' attached, then that is an easy fix.

With only a few hundred file, it's easy to look at the list and spot the outliers. In a real world scenario, how would you know that a few dozen files are missing when you search for "karl" and the files tagged with "Kral" don't show up? On a small file collections that only you has access to, you might remember them and notice that they aren't part of the results but that doesn't work for large libraries or if multiple people are collaborating.

With a directory structure at least you can look into the folder of the project, see what's inside and open the files to find the one you were looking for. If you were looking for a specific Word file and only a dozen of them are present in the folder, you can always just open all of them manually to check what's inside regardless of how poorly they were named/managed. Good luck trying to find the Word file with bad tags when searching for "*.docx" return thousands of results.

Cleaning data for tags is about the same as cleaning data in a relational database table. Here is a demo video of how Didgets does that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqkNeU1LYEQ Just think of each defined tag as one of the columns in the table.

If you were trying to find a physical copy of an important tax related letter, would you prefer to search for it in a folder dedicated to tax document from that year or from a room filled with every single piece of paper that you have ever received by mail in your life?

A pure tag system only works for small libraries, it requires far more discipline by properly tagging every single file, it does not scale and it does not work well when you collaborate with other people. It works well in situation where you can automate the tagging (eg. a collection of pirated moves) but is pure garbage for normal files that you typically use.

It's a lot easier to tell people to place pictures of karl in the "karl" folder than it is to make sure that every single picture gets properly tagged with the word "karl". I can imagine hundreds of different scenarios where it gets tagged slightly wrong. Typos won't be easy to fix because they will simply not show up in the search when you type it. How many files with "K arl", "Carl" or " karrl" are there? no one will know.

There seems to be a lot of confusion here about Didget's tagging system. It is not meant to replace the file hierarchy, but to supplement it. With Didgets you can still organize all your files in a plain old folder hierarchy without tagging everything. Tags just provide a secondary way to search for things. So you can still stick all your photos of Karl in a folder named 'Karl' if you like.