What's a good categorizing program?

[Hayzen]

For example, if you have an assortment of different music, videos, photos, etc, is there a good program that you can sort them out with and be easily found with a keyword, etc?

Or do you just make file directories to sort them out?

i.e. All the exciting music goes in this directory, all the sad music goes in this directory, etc, etc?

Thanks!

 

[nosys70]

the problem with sorting things, is if you ask two people to sort them , you will get 2 different results.
Even if you ask the same person to sort the same things twice , you will get different result , because the sorting rules will be selected differently depending the current needs.
And to add to the problem, usually the criteria you will use to find something, will not be the ones they were sorted with.

what is done usually when big amount of data is present, is not to sort them, but attach to each item a tag, Then you can use a database to retrieve according the tag. The good thing is you can attach several tags to the same object, modify it or delete it, without actually moving the object from a class to another.

unfortunately this require a huge amount of work, or you can use some metadata if available.
For example , a good mp3 include some tags, describing album, singer, song title, year of production etc.... and you can add some utilites that can retrieve the BPM (beat per minute), or event hitech tools than can have the full text of the song available, or retrieve song that sounds like another one.
For pictures and video it is a lot more difficult, while some format like mpeg4 where created with this in mind.

for pictures, the best is to have a big screen and thumbnail views, so you eye can find in seconds what a computer could never find.

There are now some programs that are able to make face recognition on pictures allowing you to sort your family's photo, but that not really usefull.

I got 500gig og Mp3 music and they are sorted by Language (English, spanish, french....), then Singer Name. since each file contain the song title, you can still user a file search tool for keyvord.
But if you are just looking for a Waltz, there is no help with such sorting, except if you know the title or the composer. But fortunately, you can make shortcuts in windoes, so you can create folders that contains different sorting with just shortcuts (like all the love songs, whatever language, year, music style).
But as i said, each time you need to find something, it is usually NOT already sorted the way you need.

 

[Hayzen]

Wow, thanks for the informative answer.

I'll check out tags option.

Is there any specific program you recommend using?