I do all that you mentioned with my movies. But just in a cleartext file.

First, I type the movie name and then all it’s properties (actors, producer, country, year, genre, ..). When I’m looking for something particular, I just do a ctrl+F for it. Every movie is located in it’s own folder, so everything will always be ordered alphabetically.

@ Owen:

Nice! Glad I could help.

I also noticed that Vista has a halfway implemented tagging support as well. Sadly, I think you can tag Office documents and JPG’s which makes it fairly useless.

@ Kim Johnsson:

Well, maybe I’m just a hoarder. I prefer to download stuff on the off-chance that I will want to revisit it again later. This includes movies, TV-shows and etc. I usually prefer to grab a torrent even if there is a streaming version available out there on Hulu or whatever else.

Local copy always seems more substantial to me – even if I delete it right after watching.

@ Luke Maciak:
Haha, everyone who knows me by name on the internet knows I have porn anyway. Well, except my parents, but they can’t really use the internet so it’s ok. My mum still insists on calling Google “goggle” -_-

Oh, and to counter your points:

– *tube resolution is more than enough for what the content is intended for. HD porn just seems like a waste of space to me, to be honest.
– Most if not all *tube players I’ve used allow you to skip to anywhere without buffering the entire clip. Sure, you have to wait for it to buffer that particular part, but that only takes a few seconds.
– True, content does get taken down sometimes. I don’t have a lot of favorites per se though, and generally they’re not worth the extra effort. There’s always something else anyway.
– I don’t have favorite girls either, so I can’t really argue that point. Sure, torrent sites do often have a better range, but seriously… how much different stuff do you really need? :P If I really care about what girl it is I’ll stick to my own collection, and that doesn’t exist on torrent sites either ;)

@ Luke Maciak:
Ah, fantastic news! Admittedly 90% of my data is on my PC at home, but at least that will give me a step in the right direction for if I end up using my MBP primarily and then just doing a dump across to a NAS or similar when I’m at home.

Thanks for the link to the article!

@ Jereme Kramer:

I actually don’t do folder hierarchies for music. I have a single directory called “mus” that acts as a dumping ground for all the mp3 files I obtain from various places. Then I use foobar to find things for me when I want to listen to them.

@ IceBrain:

Dude, these are some very useful links. I am totally checking out Picard and GCStar.

@ Nathan:

Yep, IceBrain is right. Hard links can make the collection harder to maintain or clean up.

@ Jason Scheirer:

I never used BeOS. That’s the funny thing about proprietary technology though – sometimes innovative and clever products are totally overshadowed by crap that is aggressively marketed to the masses.

Back in the day, Amiga OS was in every way superior to the early releases of Windows (which was just a half-assed graphical shell for MS -DOS. And yet, look at what happened.

@ Kim Johnsson:

Bummer. I thought that the libraries were something to look forward in Win7. Oh well.

Also, good job posting under your real name and mentioning your pr0n collection at the same time. ;)

Btw, locally stored pr0n is superior because:

– the resolution is usually better
– you can skip to the “good parts” without waiting for it to buffer
– *tube sites regularly shuffle their content and take scenes down
– pr0n torrent sites offer better range of choice – for example if you want to find more scenes with a particular girl and etc..

@ Owen:

Wait… You are on a Mac. Doesn’t OSX have built in file tagging? I forgot to mention it in my post but their meta-data system is possibly the best one on the market right now.

Check this lifehacker article that makes suggestions on how to use it.

Given my propensity towards (anally-retentively) tagging everything correctly in my Music collection, I’d like to be able to apply this to other things such as images; let’s say for example I have some holiday snaps from when I went to, as an example, the UK. I might have a folder called Holiday-UK-2010 or something similar, but what I’d love to be able to do is tag each image individually with metadata, so that I could do something as simple as opening either Spotlight (on my MBP) or something similar for my PC running XP, and then type a few things in and it would search through the tags, and done.

Let’s just say a photo of myself standing in front of the pillars in Cardiff where Torchwood is based (huge Dr Who and Torchwood nerd here) and it’s a very blue sky, then I could meta-data it to have say, “me, cardiff, uk, torchwood, blue, docks” etc. Tag with a bunch of things in the image itself so that while my hierarchical directory listing stays intact, I’m able to grab something immediately by typing in a few tags.

This could also work well in those amusing pictures you download from the internet; the image might be called “3452524.jpg” but is a picture of a guy wearing a hollowed out watermelon for a hat (do not ask why). That way instead of having to scroll through your folders for a while, simply mashing in “watermelon” would give you the result very quickly.

This could be applied to the movies you might get too, so that you might have The Matrix.avi, but you can meta-tag it with “keanu reeves, carrie anne moss, laurence fishburne, action, ” etc etc. Simply open whatever meta-searching tool you use, and BAM!

I know this would take a LONG time to tag everything perfectly how you want, but at least until you get around to doing it all you can still use the current method. I know I’d take the time to do it. Just someone has to come up with something :)

Also, dunno why I’m suddenly posting under my real name XD

/freelancer

@Luke: I use Win7 as my primary OS and I’ve played around with Libraries a bit. They’re not particularly awesome. In short, it’s just like hardlinking a bunch of folders into a “library”. You can’t link files, you can’t link folders based on criteria, and when you’re done you’re still bound by the hierarchy of whatever folders you include. Oh, and if you include a folder, all of its files and subfolders will be included. No way of limiting it to certain filetypes.
So basically it’s just a way to aggregate a bunch of folders at different places in the filesystem. Which, sure, could be useful, for example if you have music on several partitions and want it all in the same place. But it doesn’t really solve the problems with an HFS, unless you wanna put every file that needs a different tag in a folder of its own -_-

@IceBrain: I agree, some sort of auto-tagging would be vital for the success of a tag-based FS. There’s lots of ways it could be implemented though, some of which should be rather trivial. As long as the actual tagging is exposed (maybe some FS utility to tag/untag files), writing a script to for example read ID3 tags and tag the files appropriately would be fairly easy.

@Nathan: It’s also not very convenient. I should know, I tried organizing my porn with it XD (I’ve mostly given up on locally stored porn now though in favour of *tube sites)

This is funny, because the BeOS file system had tags (and really a very nice file metadata scheme, period) and super fast search/index almost 15 years ago.

@ Nathan: That fails the “cascade delete” requirement, though.