In order to see and edit file tags, you have to enable "View (Tab) → Details pane" in the File Explorer.įile Explorer with the details pane on the right hand side. Support for tagging started as early as with Windows Vista. (click for a larger version)Īlthough I'm very interested in topics related to tagging this feature is that well hidden so that I was not aware of this feature myself until I read about it in a book in 2018. Probably for a good reason, which we are going to find out below.įile Explorer showing files that actually have been tagged before. So we do have a more or less full support for tagging files and yet Microsoft hides this quite well from the common eye. It will be a long journey after all.īy default, the Windows UI does not expose anything at all that would help the users to recognize the file tagging possibility. I could elaborate on tag and tag-system definitions for quite some time but let us stop here for the sake of brevity. "Keywords" and "tags" are used as synonyms here. This describes the process of attaching one or more unique keywords to files stored on NTFS file systems by users who are able to access the file with granted write-permissions via the Windows File Explorer. History, Implementation Details, and Similar Implementationsįor this article, I am talking about non-collaborative local file-tagging.Relations Between Applications and Meta-Data. Applied tags are easily lost so that in practice, users will refrain from using native Windows file tagging like this. Although there are quite nice retrieval functions for tags, it is very complicated to use this for general file management. Some applications do also merge format-specific tags with these NTFS tags. TL DR: Microsoft Windows does provide NTFS features to tag arbitrary files. Let's take a closer look why I came to this conclusion. Because from my perspective, it obviously can't be meant to be used in practice. Therefore, complaining on bad design decisions does not apply here as long as Microsoft does not understand this kind of tagging as something which was designed to be used by the general user. To my knowledge, Microsoft is currently not actively promoting this feature. Please do read my general recommendations on using tags in an efficient way. I do have a strong background with PIM and tagging and this article is written from the human perspective when manually tagging user-generated files. This quite lengthy article explains and discusses the built-in file tagging implementation of Microsoft Windows 10.
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