What Is File Tagging?
File tagging is an easy way to organize your files based on what they're tagged with, instead of where they are on your hard drive. It's fast and easy, and once you try it, you may wonder how you ever used to find anything.
When you tag a file, you're just associating a word with that file, like a category. You're not changing the content of the file, but you're adding some extra information to what the operating system knows about it. And you can associate multiple tags with each file.
Once you've tagged some files, TagBot can call up your files according to the tags you've tagged them with, lickety-split. That's where the value of tagging lies: it's a way to categorize your files and fetch them according to your categories, regardless of which directory they live in, and whether you've moved them around.
A Metaphor, If You Will
Think of it this way... Pretend that instead of a computer, you've got a filing cabinet. In that filing cabinet you have all your documents in their folders, in various drawers. So right now you know two things about each file: you know in which drawer and which folder it lives, and you know what each file contains. Well, you probably at least have a rough idea, anyway.
But one day you get the great idea to make up some stickers, each with a single word on them. You use words like "important", and "favorite". You take the stickers you've made, and you stick them on your documents. So now you know three things about each file: its location, its contents, and one or more categories that you've applied to it.
That's all well and good, but it's about to get better. Because *poof*, now you also have a robot. This robot has the singular ability to rifle through all the files in your filing cabinet and retrieve for you all the files with a given tag or set of tags applied to them.
Between the tags that you've applied to your files, and the ability of this robot to retrieve your files based on their tags, you've got a great new way to organize your stuff. Without changing the contents of a file or the drawer and folder that you keep a file in, you can change the tags that you've stuck on your file. And you can access your files according to their tags really quickly. So now, you find that you can get all of your important files with the press of a button. The same goes for your favorite files, and your urgent files, and so on. You can even get all your urgent and important files in one shot, by asking the robot to get all your files having both tags.
Back to Your Computer
This is really powerful stuff. Because you can change where you keep a file, and the tag will stay with it, so the robot can find it no matter where you put it. You can stick as many tags as you like on a file, and you can use these tags on any type of file, regardless of whether they're a Word document, or a photo, or a music file, or a Safari bookmark, or whatever. Anything that is a file can be tagged, and anything that is tagged can be retrieved really quickly by TagBot. And of course, all it takes to tag a file is to drag it onto a tag in TagBot, or to right-click it and select the tag you want to add from a list. So it's easy to download TagBot and start tagging your files immediately.
Did I mention that it's free to use for as long as you want with up to six tags, and a full license for use with unlimited tags is only $20 USD? :)
Anyway, so when we talk about "file tagging", that's what we mean. That's what TagBot does. It lets you set up a list of tags, and then makes it super fast and easy to tag your files and retrieve them by tag. It does this without altering the actual contents of the file, and it works with anything that can be saved as a file on your hard drive. It's a new way of organizing your files that fits in with your existing organization system without changing anything.
It's especially great for anyone who deals with a lot of files, or even just anyone who doesn't like to bother to set up lots of folders and be careful about where you put things. With TagBot, it doesn't matter where you put that file; you can just tag it and forget it. Let TagBot find it for you later.
