Switching file explorer option: View → Group by → "Tags". You can change the grouping in the "View" tab of the File Explorer: Be default, File Explorer is grouping by names:įile Explorer in Pictures library showing default view with "Group by (None)". However, what is really neat is when you consider the "Group by"-method. Since the order of files in the "sorted by tags"-view is depending on the order of tags within the files, I do not consider this a great improvement. With tags, you might also sort alphabetically by tags instead:įile Explorer view: sorted by file tags. For navigating through your files, you might prefer your File Explorer sorted alphabetically by file name:įile Explorer view: sorted by file name. Now that we have tagged some files, what possibilities are there to use this meta-data in daily life? First of all, there is navigation. (click for a larger version)Īs shown in the screenshots above, tags might be added/removed/modified at two places: either on the "Details pane" (on the right hand side of the File Explorer window) or within the file properties on its "Details" tab. The last place where File Explorer is showing you the assigned tags and also allows to edit them is within the Properties of a file:ĭetails tab of the Properties of a file showing tags. Multiple tags are usually separated by semicolons which is probably the only standard character which is not allowed within tags. You will recognize that Microsoft allows tags with spaces and special characters. (click for a larger version)Īdding or modifying tags is possible in the Details pane but not in the tags column. (click for a larger version)Īssigned tags are visible in the details pane as well as in the tags column:įile Explorer showing tags of JPEG file. For example, the details pane for a simple text file does not show the "Tags: Add a tag" in contrast to any JPEG image file as shown in the screen-shots above.įile Explorer showing details pane for a text file: no tagging possible for this file type (yet). When you go through different files, you will recognize that not all file types can be tagged by default. There is a second UI feature you might want to activate: the read-only Tags column is activated by choosing "Tags" in the context menu of the column bar:įile Explorer: activating the Tags column. In order to see and edit file tags, you have to enable "View (Tab) → Details pane" in the File Explorer.įile Explorer with the details pane on the right hand side. Support for tagging started as early as with Windows Vista. (click for a larger version)Īlthough I'm very interested in topics related to tagging this feature is that well hidden so that I was not aware of this feature myself until I read about it in a book in 2018. Probably for a good reason, which we are going to find out below.įile Explorer showing files that actually have been tagged before. So we do have a more or less full support for tagging files and yet Microsoft hides this quite well from the common eye. It will be a long journey after all.īy default, the Windows UI does not expose anything at all that would help the users to recognize the file tagging possibility. I could elaborate on tag and tag-system definitions for quite some time but let us stop here for the sake of brevity. "Keywords" and "tags" are used as synonyms here. This describes the process of attaching one or more unique keywords to files stored on NTFS file systems by users who are able to access the file with granted write-permissions via the Windows File Explorer. History, Implementation Details, and Similar Implementationsįor this article, I am talking about non-collaborative local file-tagging.Relations Between Applications and Meta-Data.Applied tags are easily lost so that in practice, users will refrain from using native Windows file tagging like this. Although there are quite nice retrieval functions for tags, it is very complicated to use this for general file management. Some applications do also merge format-specific tags with these NTFS tags. TL DR: Microsoft Windows does provide NTFS features to tag arbitrary files. Let's take a closer look why I came to this conclusion. Because from my perspective, it obviously can't be meant to be used in practice. Therefore, complaining on bad design decisions does not apply here as long as Microsoft does not understand this kind of tagging as something which was designed to be used by the general user. To my knowledge, Microsoft is currently not actively promoting this feature. Please do read my general recommendations on using tags in an efficient way. I do have a strong background with PIM and tagging and this article is written from the human perspective when manually tagging user-generated files. This quite lengthy article explains and discusses the built-in file tagging implementation of Microsoft Windows 10.
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