Folders v. tags

Question

Some of the most helpful posters in here regularly make statements about the advantages of tags, captions and so on and advise people to 'forget about folders'. For example, dj_paige wrote a few weeks ago:
Folders is an antique method of organizing, and the PSE Organizer was designed to replace folders with a more powerful set of tools. Instead, think in terms of tags and captions, because these give you a much more powerful way to organize and slice and dice your photos than folders gives you. With tags, for example, you can search your photos across numerous vacations to find just those photos that your children are in. You can't do that easily with folders. There are many more advantages...
A Windows user, I can't help thinking that this may be misleading. It's fine if all you want to do is create a museum with all your pictures carefully catalogued so you can quickly locate and admire particular specimens. But many of us use PSE's editing functions to enhance our own or other people's pictures, with a view to using them in some other context. However many tags, captions, albums and stacks I create in Organizer, they don't help me to find a picture of Mayor Goldstein to place in the newsletter I'm composing in Indesign, or to put in the email I'm about to send, or to upload to a website, or to illustrate the report I'm writing in Word, for example. In all these cases, I have to know which folder the picture is in, because the applications I'm using have to be able to find
it. Until applications get wise enough to be able to read PSE's proprietary metadata, there's no substitute for carefully constructed, meaningful file names in an equally carefully designed folder structure. Add to that Windows' capability to add searchable keywords, comments and other file properties, and the return on the time spent tagging pictures in the PSE Organizer gets smaller and smaller.
I'd be interested to hear in what ways PSE 'replaces folders with a more powerful set of tools' and what the 'many more advantages' are.
Noel

Answer 1

Thanks for your comments, and sorry for taking so long to respond. I've been trying to devise some sort of hybrid system (Colin Codebreaker: there will always be a mixture of the two philosophies) bearing in mind what you've written, and I'll probably get there in the end.
When Colin says All my images finish up in Folders based on the Shot Date, he highlights some of the difficulties inherent in the 'forget about folders' approach. First, it seems to me a criminal waste of a valuable data point (the folder name) just to re-use the shot date, which any system (including Windows) that can read the exif data will have access to anyway. Folder names and hierarchies are an immensely powerful first-level sorting option that any Windows process can make use of, so it makes sense to me to use them wisely. Second, only a fraction of my images come from my camera. My photographer drops his into a shared folder on my machine, some I download from FTP or websites, and many come by email or on removable media. So I have to use purpose-orientated folders rather than
subject- or date-orientated ones.
Colin and John RE both point out that you can drag and drop images from the Organiser into other applications. I've tried this with Indesign, and it works properly inasmuch as D&D creates a link to the image file (D&D from PS does as well, but from Illustrator doesn't). But because the PSE window is so big, it's not easy to execute on a small monitor like my laptop screen - there just isn't the space clearly to see both the source and the destination of a D&D. The D&D icon (a baby thumbnail with a hand in the middle) makes accurate placing impossible; when I drop, the image seems to land with its top left-hand corner at the middle of the icon, which of course conceals the dropping point at the destination. If I D&D from Bridge or within Indesign, the dropping point is precisely at the
top left-hand corner of the thumbnail.
dj_p extols the virtues of tags and captions to help find particular images. The cross-referencing capabilities that this facilitates are indeed powerful, but I already have that capability using built-in Windows tools. Tagging by D&D is quick and easy, but keywords are then written to an extra file - so for 10,000 images I need 20,000 files! Sure, I can then write those keywords and other data to the image file itself (for some types of file), but for some reason not to the properties fields that the OS provides for the purpose. If someone could suggest a utility that would write IPTC data to the Windows Title, Subject, Category and Keyword fields, I'd be very happy. I could then use Organizer solely to apply keyword tags - which it's very good at - and forget about all its other bells
and whistles.
The workflow that dj_p suggests for locating a file to put into a document seems very cumbersome to me: fire up Organizer, find the file, export it to another folder, then in the receiving app locate that folder and file and place it. Organizer is very resource-hungry (it's currently using 475MB of VM, having peaked at 585MB, and has clocked up an astonishing 9 mio IO reads/writes since I launched it about twelve hours ago. By contrast, Windows SearchIndexer has only performed 745,000 reads/writes to maintain its index of almost 600,000 files), so I'm loth to have it running alongside, say, Indesign just to make use of its search facility. It's much quicker and easier to locate a file if it has a meaningful file name and lives in a meaningfully-named folder. I have also tried Bridge, which
makes the process easier still if the image files I need are stored in folders allocated for the purpose to which I want to put them. In its Compact mode, Bridge acts just like another Indesign panel and I can select files to place at the drop of a hat. Perhaps a compact mode for PSE(O) could be a feature request.
So, again, I maintain that the PSE Organizer is fine for those who only want to set up an indexed and cross-referenced gallery of pictures, but there's no substitute for a carefully thought-out file- and folder structure if those pictures are to be used for any other purpose.
Noel