To manage digital files well, it is important to understand the concept of tagging

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Better Organization! School , office , kitchen or politics , this matter is necessary everywhere. Predicted success in studies , progress in work , peace of mind in daily life (and victory in elections!) all depend on these two magical words. Let us be as well organized as we can be without papers lying on the table , files in the cupboard , jars of pulses and spices in the kitchen , files on the computer or smartphone (and party workers or voters!).

In ' Technoworld ' our focus is on digital life so this article is enough for us to talk about the organization of digital files!

A while back we talked about the interesting use of hashtags ( #) in social media with a focus on Instagram. When many people post or message on different topics on social media, with the help of hashtags, all those different posts can be grouped together.

We can apply the exact same concept to the organization of our various types of digital files. While files can be easily searched across computers and various apps/services , the use of tagging is not limited to finding files easily. What is the special use of it , let's know!

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In social media, we write any word along with hashtag ( #) along with any post or message or video, and in the service that supports hashtag, that word including hashtag turns into a clickable link. So if we have added a hashtag #gujarat to a post , by clicking on it , we can see all the posts or videos or other content that as many people have added #gujarat with their posts or videos on that social media platform together.

By applying the same concept of tags to our daily work files , emails , photographs , tasks , notes, etc., we can better manage files that are important to us. The only difference is that in social media, a hashtag sign is placed in front of the text to give a different identity to the tags , when it comes to the organization of files in a computer , mobile device or other type of service, it is often not necessary to put a hashtag sign in it. Such services have different ways of using tags that are almost identical. Similarly, different services use the terms ' tag ', ' label ', ' category ' etc. for the tagging feature.

Now the question is that we can put our different files in different folders, then why bother to tag the files separately ? The answer is quite simple and obvious - to organize files better.

Let's compare digital files with real files to better understand the need for tags. In most offices the actual files are very well organized. In the cupboard, files should be kept in year-wise , client-wise or project-wise boxes and the papers related to that matter should be corrected.

The problem arises when we need to search for the same document in more than one way. Real files and papers can be kept in only one file or folder at a time , but what if we have to search for a file by year and we have stored files by client ?

Tags or labeling in digital files provides an accurate solution to this problem. In it we can create folder as per requirement like year wise folder or client wise folder. After that, if we give different tags or labels to the files, the same file can be found in more than one way. All files can also be sorted together by tags in a service like Windows Explorer.

When we write different tasks in a service like to-do list, if we put a label like ' meeting ' or ' to-call ' as needed, in all the tasks of the day , how many people we have to meet or call can be easily found.

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If you receive a mobile bill mail, give it a label as ' Mobile Bill ' and also give another label as ' To-Pay ' , then by sorting the mails by the first label , you can see all the mobile bill mails coming to you and ' To-Pay '. By sorting by label , apart from the mobile bill, all other bills to be paid can be viewed at once! Thus the mail is the same , but the way of checking is different. Before Google gave the world the gift of Gmail in 2004, emails only had a folder feature. A mail on us can be placed in a single folder. Not in multiple folders. One of the reasons why Gmail is so popular is its tag feature. A tag in Gmail is known as a ' label ' . If you are using Gmail as a customer support system in the office and multiple team members are using the same email address, just using labels can create a better flow of the entire system. Microsoft Outlook uses the term ' category ' for tagging .

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If you are still saving all your digital photos manually on computer or smartphone, then you will be facing a lot of difficulty in finding the desired photo among them. Computers can store photos in year-wise folders, but that makes it difficult to find certain types of photographs, such as sunset photos or birthday celebration photos from different years. Google's Photos app provides a precise solution to this issue and takes the concept of tagging to a whole new level. We don't need to manually tag any photograph in Photos. This work is done automatically with the help of computer vision. Hence, by automatically ' sensing ' the different things in the photograph, the system automatically tags the photos. Hence we easily get sorted photos according to different person , place , things etc.

Services like Facebook also tag photos using computer vision. The concept is that but the work is all automatic!

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Although the concept of tags is very powerful when it comes to digital files, various services are raw in its use. If we mostly store our files in local storage in the computer or now according to the new times, if we are storing them in Google Drive or OneDrive, the facility of tags is either not available there or if it is available, it gets corrupted. If you open Windows or Files Manager in the computer and keep the details panel open in the view, you can select any file and add a tag to it. After this the files in the folder can also be sorted according to different tags. But if these files are synced with your Microsoft account and uploaded to the cloud, the tag disappears!

The web version of Microsoft OneDrive does not have a feature to tag files. Similarly, the free account of Google Drive does not have the facility to tag files. If you are a smart user then the lack of tags or labels will definitely bother you!

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If you are a smart user of internet then you must be using some to-do list app or note keeping app. All such good apps allow us to tag or label our to-do tasks. A few years ago , a very popular to-do list app called ' Wonderlist ' made a very smart use of labeling. Then Microsoft bought this service and introduced it as ' Microsoft Todo ' . But in this new service, Microsoft made such a fuss about the tags or labels that people who have been using Wunderlist for years started looking for a better alternative instead of turning to Microsoft Tudu. Some to-do list apps only offer this feature in their paid versions as they recognize the importance of labels. If you search anything on the internet and save the things you find useful in services like Google Kit , Microsoft One Note , Evernote or Pocket, all these services provide the convenience of organizing notes with different labels. Learning to use tags smartly will make things a lot easier!