MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum QuestionsAsk a Question

Can files be tagged for filtered access later?

It’s a little difficult to clearly explain what my question is but I’ll try to frame it best I can.
I have lots of small clippings of various productions/plays/events our group has done…most in mp4. Now I’m storing them all in an external HDD. So there are folders for Comedy, College, Political etc. But what I’d like to do is have some way of accessing the files later by alternative tags. For eg a production could be a comedy, also a Delhi production, a youth play and a 2007 play. Now if its in the comedy folder, that’s the only folder it can be in….but at a later date I might want to access all my Delhi comedy plays or all 2007 productions but the folder will only have the comedy lays, which will include more than what I need. In spreadsheets it’s easy to sort by column hierarchy but is there a way/software/automator workflow whereby I can avoid access files by tags and filter out tags that don’t match?
—–
Dhruv

Comments: 2 Responses to “Can files be tagged for filtered access later?”

    13 years ago

    You can tag any file in OS X by simply getting info on it (Command+I) and putting tags in the Spotlight Comments field. These words are then search criteria when you search for the file later on.
    So you may want to organize your files by date or some other criteria, and then tag them all according to topic.
    But if you have a serious professional need for this, then you may want to look into some media library software. Isn't Adobe Bridge supposed to do exactly this? There are others too. Search for "mac media catalog software" and some things appear.
    You can build your own catalog manually in Numbers or Excel, yes. And they are both powerful enough to do what you want. But you may need to learn more about spreadsheet functions and sorting to do what you want.

    Dhruv
    13 years ago

    Thanks!

Comments Closed.