Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)

Librarians have been classifying the world's knowledge since forever, and they developed faceted classification systems (Ranganathan, 1933) to deal with these issues. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321840994_Ranganath... A notable one that hierarchies embed the point of view of the classifier, e.g. the Dewy Decimal's ridiculous classifications of religions (codes 200–299), making minute distinctions like 285 (Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational), 286 (Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Adventist), then…

Hello everyone, thank you for all the comments. Seeing this on the HN front page caught me by surprise. In the past year I shared this article publicly (Reddit) and privately (with tech-savvy acquaintances) for comment, and the general sentiment I received was that these ideas were not ready to be read by a mass audience. The article is way too long and pulls in many disparate ideas; it explains both why traditional features are problematic and how new features…

I'm going to admit that I didn't read the whole article. I remember about 10-15 years ago that there were a lot of photo organizers that supported tagging. Tag the events as birthday or the people's names. I saw a lot of people who would then post "My photo organizer has been discontinued and I spent years organizing by tags. How do I migrate all the tags to another photo editor." The hierarchical file system is kind of a lowest…

The article describes a schema extremely similar to what's implemented by https://photostructure.com