Can I shout "Plumber invoice 2021" at that pile and the right document will come flying out? Or just "invoices 2021"? A pile that could do this would probably be fine for me.
I find tags work very well for discovering other peoples content on the web, but really don't help much with organizing your own data.
One operation that seems especially problematic with tags is copying. If I want to modify something on a file system and keep a backup, I just copy the directory tree before I do my modifications. If I copy something with tags, I end up with two things with the same tags, which is not very useful for keeping them separate.
Also how do you deal with removable media (USB, DVD) in a purely tagged system? What if the tags on the media conflict with your own tags? Once you allow filtering by device, you are just reinventing the file system again.
Wouldn't a shortcut to a view of un-tagged files sorted by recent basically serve the same role as an unsorted Downloads/whatever folder?
The nice thing with a hierarchical directory structure is that every file has a place, even if a file is misplaced or misnamed, there is a good chance it will be near where it needs to be.
With tagging you don't really have that, it's just a pile and you have to hope that you can remember a query to make the file show up again.
The biggest problem however is that I don't see how you can actually work within a tagged system. How do you extract a `.zip`? How do you copy a file? How do you deal with removable media (DVD, USB)? Finding a file and handing it over to an app is not the only way we deal with files.
Your local file system is a work environment, where you are the one creating and modifying files. Tagging seems to works best when it comes to exploring around other peoples content, but that kind of exploration is not something I do on my local machine with my own files, since I already know where I put them.
Now, imagine how many files are being shifted around on a regular basis. Temp files, cached downloads, automatic installs of software updates, all sorts of crap your IT department may remotely put on your work laptop, etc. Sorting by date isn't all that useful. At least with folders, we have an 'enforced' blast radius if random junk shows up; my temp files stay in my temp folders, install files stay where they should, system files stay with my OS, etc.
And don't get me started on how things can end up in odd places on mobile devices OSs.
But I agree that I wouldn't want those pictures to be mixed with e.g. other random screenshots or drawings that I made, even if they could be separated by tags somehow. So folders as a hard separation would still make sense.
ls **/*Plumber*We all know how this ends up. It ends up being like Google where the search engine uses word embeddings and the like and removes word from your search queries or replaces November by December because they are both months so you can substitute one for the other right ?
Hierarchical structures, while inflexible and sometimes prone to mis-categorization, provide navigational cues that tags don't provide. It's almost like with GUIs vs CLI - if you know what's already possible and want to express yourself precisely, you want a CLI (tags with lots of Boolean operators to precisely include/exclude). And conversely, if you don't know what's already possible, but could figure it out if you have the options laid out in front of you, then GUI (a hierarchy with all choices already laid out) will be more relevant.