Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with tagging

Delicious for pdfs?

furious — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:55:40 -0800

How can I organize offline pdfs on windows so that they're easy to find offline using a standard browser? In a perfect world, it would be like delicious, but for pdfs. Tags, sortable by tags, compact display. Endnote and Wordpress are the available tools. This is on Windows. There is an offline wordpress blog. There are a bunch of pdfs in folders on a shared drive. I wish I could have something like delicious, where anybody who has access to the shared drive could look for the pdfs by putting in tags. The listings brought up would be linked to the pdf files.

So with Endnote, Wordpress and a bunch of pdf files, how can I create an index that allows the pdfs to be searched for easily, by subject, tag, author, etc using a standard browser? A single page could be created on the wordpress blog with a list of all the pdfs, with keywords. A control+f search could be used to locate useful pdfs. But that would not be sortable. The wordpress blog already has entries, so entering each pdf as a separate entry would not work - tags would give you things other than links to the pdf files. An additional wordpress blog solely for the pdfs is not an option.

Example: person x says "I wonder about salamanders' tongues." Uses Internet Explorer or Firefox to go to the page. Tag search-animals. Nothing. Tag search amphibians. Tag search amphibians+anatomy. Brings up 5 locally linked pdfs. Person x wants more- tag search for salamander brings up 30 results. To get just recent results, tag search salamander+2009.

If there were some way to get some code from delicious, put it into a single page on the wordpress blog and have it mimic delicious, that would be perfect.

Any ideas? The process of entering in all the information will be arduous and time consuming, so I want the final product to be worth it.

Automatic song identification/tagging?

mojoworkin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:07:13 -0800

Any programs that can analyze and tag individual MP3 files that have NO metadata? I have a pile of untagged files, and so far no joy. I have a big, fat, messy pile of files, and would love a head-start on getting them tagged and filed. It seems there are some programs that are geared to ALBUMS, but I don't really care about album info as much as I am in accurate artist/title. There are iPhone apps that can listen and identify songs through the mic.. I have to believe there is a desktop program that would do this by the batch.

PLEASE HELP! Thanks!

Which publishing tool should I use for topic-based blogging?

diogenes — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:36:33 -0800

What tool should I use for publishing extended thoughts that I want to link to from Twitter? I'd like something topic-based, with tagging, that lives in the cloud? Does such a thing exist? I'm a technical writer, and I recently discovered a thriving community of my peers on Twitter (much to my surprise). Now that I've joined the dialog, I find that I often want to say more than I can fit in 140 characters. Obviously I need a blog. I've used various tools (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) for short-lived blogs in the past, so I'm not a complete newbie to the idea.

Basically, I'm wondering what newfangled technologies are out there. I'm not even sure if what I need is a blog. I just want a way to post and organize extended thoughts. I'm starting to use topic-based tools in my technical writing, and I love the idea of building standalone bits of information that can be tagged, sorted, and rearranged. Is there anything like that for "blogging."

Where can I find better music metadata?

imposster — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:47:48 -0800

Need more metadata for my music. I'm looking for track-by-track recording date/performers/composer/etc. mainly for jazz albums. Is there a source out there? Right now, I'm ripping my CD to FLAC with dBpoweramp using the AMG subscription to fill in the metadata. I'm making small changes as I go (mainly to the year and genre). but I'd really like to have the detailed information found in most liner notes. (For the albums I really care about, I'm keeping both the CD and the liners for reference). Is there a service out there that can provide this? AMG's data doesn't seem to go down to that level, nor does Musicbrainz. Certainly other music fans have done this manually already. Are they sharing it somewhere? Thanks for any help.

USB key-friendly photo viewer for Windows /w tagging?

onshi — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:04:36 -0800

Can you recommend a lightweight, USB key-friendly photo viewer software for Windows that supports tagging? If Cornice Portable supported tags (or was still under development) that would be perfect, as I use PortableApps on my thumb drive. Ideas/suggestions?

Cloud File Storage with Tagging

king walnut — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:15:26 -0800

What's a good cloud file storage service that has TAGGING? It doesn't have to be free. I've looked through dozens of reviews, and I can't find one that offers file tagging. At least none of the ones that look like they'll still be around next year.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

An MP3 tagging problem

Proginoskes — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:16:54 -0800

I have several mp3s where the Title tag contains no spaces. For example, if the song is "Tangled Up In Blue", the title tag in the mp3 is "tangledupinblue". Is there any tagging software that will sort through these files and insert spaces between the words?

Using the Windows "find" command is getting really tedious...

fvox13 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:23:17 -0800

We need a web-based photo and video storage and tagging system. Does anyone have recommendations? I work in the IT department at a small college, and our Marketing department needs a photo and video storage and tagging system. We can definitely provide them with the hardware, in the form of a NAS in our datacenter, but the software is difficult to find.

Basically, their requirements boil down to a software package that is:
- Web-based, so that staff and consultants can access these files remotely
- Tag-based, so that, as images are added, they can get tagged as "biology" or "commencement 2008" or whatever
- Limited to authenticated users, so that the entire world doesn't steal our pictures and videos
- Able of being hosted internally, due to speed and bandwidth concerns

As IT, we need it to be secure, easy to maintain, and for the authentication piece, it really should do LDAP or Active Directory. If it's written in something common like Python, PHP, or ColdFusion, we can probably add that functionality ourselves.

So, my question to the hive mind is: Is there such a software package in existence? If so, is there an open source package, even if it's a commercial open-source package? We'd like to be able to customize it.

What does, for example, photos.com, or other stock photo websites use for this purpose? If we could buy that type of software, it would meet our needs perfectly.

itunes whut?

saysthis — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:25:43 -0800

I have a 100g+ and growing music collection that needs proper management. Currently I just dump it in to winamp and hit shuffle, but that doesn't help me tag or organize the stuff, and sometimes the transitions between songs are pretty jarring, e.g. it'll jump from Tortoise to Black Flag. I'm looking for software or winamp plugin(s) that can fix both these problems: Specifically, the music player I want will do these things:
1) Support tagging and adding a song to new playlists as I'm listening.
2) Maintain a solid tracklist of things already played, so that I can go back and add details as I need to.
3) Have some kind of bpm/tempo/whatnot analysis intelligent enough to separate my experimental noise tracks from my snarly garage rock from my dub, and preferably with graduated beat transition management.
4) Not hijack my system with adware or pester me for constant updates.
5) Gotta be able to function off a network - the player computers and server where the music is stored are different devices.

Optionally, I'd love it to gel with ptunes or core media pocket player, but that's not a dealbreaker for me right now, since my phone can't hold 100g.

AND, if it's got an on-the-fly language switching or some kind of multilingual profile support, oooooh! We're a bilingual household, and it significantly lowers usage barriers for the wife if she only has to learn to click one button for her language.

Does this exist? Please say yes.

Where does "Cashew, Carrot and Cardamom Cupcakes with Cashew Cream Cheese Frosting go?

the luke parker fiasco — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:08:18 -0800

Help an application Luddite find a good system for organising recipes. I'm looking for a blog-like organisational system that I can use for an offline compendium of files--specifically, a recipe collection. I'd like to be able to sort, cross-reference, etc., using tags and keywords like ingredients or recipe type, instead of having either a glut of filenames that need to be scanned or an arbitrary filing system based on name or main ingredient or whatever.

Does anything like this exist as a non web-based application? I'm currently on a Mac but once I get back to the States will be back on Linux.

Tag--you're it

peanut_mcgillicuty — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:15:59 -0800

How can I tag my large collection of video files for easy searching? I've read this question but it's two years old and doesn't specifically solve my problem of different formats. Picasa catalogs every media file on my hard drive (as opposed to the one folder I'd like to catalog), except it inexplicably did not include more than 700 of the files that I WANT to tag, even though the formats are supposedly supported.

What's new since 2007 that might help me? I have basically the same requirements:
1. free for Windows XP
2. save the tags and descriptions in the video file itself
3. have a decent user interface (like photoshop album or something similar)
4. small and fast memory footprint
5. Bonus points for a portable app that could be run from a thumb drive

Thanks!

Advice on documentation tagging?

jethrographic — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:47:04 -0800

I am several weeks away from leaving my job for a new one. As a result, I need to document my current development efforts for the several folks who will be taking over my responsibilities. My challenge is how to organize documentation about individual components with some additional flexibility. I’m looking for a method, or software, that would allow a thorough initial organization of documentation notes, but also enable other slices or views: show me all bits that live on server X, show me all of the bits that support application Y, what applications depend on script Z, etc. This will be very light documentation – more of a roadmap covering where bits live and what they do broadly. I will continue with some transitional activities over the coming months to support deeper questions.

At a coarse level, I work on 3 types of components: data scripts, relational databases, and web GIS applications. I think these three areas make a nice basic framework for a thorough initial organization. However the pieces are intertwined in many other ways that my colleagues might need to know about – by application stack, by server, by project, by programming language etc.

I think some tagging of note elements is an answer, but not sure how to implement? We do use Trac and SVN, but I have been a bit slack about keeping all of my code there. I have also used FreeMind, but it doesn’t seem flexible enough. I have seen some ontology software that works like this (click an element and the word cloud reorganizes), but I’m not sure how ideal that is for notes. I could even make a word doc with tags, which is not dynamic, but still searchable.

Thanks for any and all suggestions…

Looking for a Wordpress tagging plugin.

gramcracker — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:57:07 -0800

Searching for a Wordpress tagging plugin that will work like the tag search functions work here on MeFi or on del.icio.us. It's got to be out there, I just don't know how to search for it. I'd like a plugin that will know when I'm viewing tag X that there are other posts that include tag X and suggest tag Y or tags X+Y.

Like, for example, here on the music tag, I can either search for things that have also been tagged along with music, or search for posts tagged as music+mp3.

Tagging software for some National History Day kids?

rev- — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:50:32 -0800

Can anyone recommend software that allows basic tagging of data, such that if I say I'm interested in X, it will say, "You might also like A B ad C" because they are also tagged the same as X. The question is for a National History Day program. The national office picks a theme and everyone picks a topic that relates to that theme. The problem is that kids aged 10-16 are not particularly worldly or aware of so many neat topics. Consequently, judges see a lot of topics around Helen Keller, 1960's Civil Rights, and Navajo Code Talkers.

What if there was a web site that showed all topics and a kid could see a quick synopsis of the topic. And what if we plugged in a lot of "common" topics and build a tagging system around it. "Interested in Helen Keller? Have you thought about A, B or C?"

So, since I'm not a programmer, I was wondering if anyone's come across a simple tagging tool that would allow me to build something like that?

Thanks!

How do you index your Ray Mears clips?

verisimilitude — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:39:26 -0800

How can I add summary data to my video files? I've recently started a project to put all of Ray Mears's survival tips into some sort of idexable format. At this early stage I'm taking the hour long TV episodes and splitting them into 20 or so short avi. clips. To do this I'm using Windows Movie Maker to view the show and strip out all the content that isn't pure Ray wilderness gold. The output avi. I then put through a simple wmv/avi. splitter.

My question is in two parts. The first general, second specific.

1) Am I going about this project in the best way? This is the first video editing Ive done, so if there is better software for stripping the useful content out of TV shows then please let me know.

2) I'm going to finish up with about 1000 clips of educational wilderness survival, and I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to organise them ... but I'm sure that the tagging needs to be done now. For example, a clip with Ray demonstrating how to build a pit oven I would tag "cooking" "woodland" "meat preparation" - I'm sure you get the idea. But how do associate these tags with the file? I assumed I would just be able to open each of the avi file's properties and add the tags as summary data. Alas no. The summary data is 'greyed out' so my plan appears to be foiled.

My concern about this greyed out quirk led me (via a google search) straight to those infuriating bastards at 'experts exchange' where my question has been posed:

"I'd like to enter some descriptive comments for some of my files, to view in explorer (via My Computer), but when I rightclick/properties/summary/simple, everything is greyed out (well, greened out)."

So google as fails me, my faith in the Hive Mind grows.

Thanks for reading all this.

Help me find the image manager of my dreams?

verb — Sat, 03 May 2008 11:23:07 -0800

I'm sitting on an extensive collection of ephemera and period clip-art. I use it a lot for designs, presentations, and assorted projects, but as it's grown organizing the contents has turned into an impossible task... Is there a file/image management program out there that will let me keyword-tag the images, search them, browse thumbnails, and so on? My ideal solution would be a Spotlight-integrated tagging solution in Finder, and SpotMeta seemed perfect. Unfortunately, it's been abandoned and no longer works in Leopard.

Email tagging program

cbushko — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:24:49 -0800

My google-fu is failing me on this one. Years ago I found a program that would take all the email I recieved, add it to a database and then it would run some algorithm to associate all of the email information together; essentially tagging it all. I was then able to open up their web interface and search for any topic I wished from my past emails. Think of tagging bookmarks ala del.ic.ious but for email but it auto-tagged everything on it's own. Basically the flow of email would be Exchange server -> "this program" -> Outlook. I vaguely recall that the program was written in Java and was freely available.

Geoblogging - how do I keep friends updated while I walk 100km for charity?

uk_giffo — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:52:41 -0800

In the summer me and three friends will be doing a 100km 30-hour walk for charity alongside lots of other teams. I was hoping to come up with a way in which friends, family and donors can check on our progress in real time, from afar. Ideally, what I would like to do is create a web page, which would incorporate a Google Maps, er, map. Within this map would be the route we've walked so far illustrated with chronological numbered points. Clicking on a numbered point would bring up maybe a quick comment or a photo that I will have posted from my GPS-capable phone (it's a Nokia N95). Or maybe the numbered point will be a hyperlink to a blog post further down the page. But anyway, it's not really the layout I'm having trouble envisaging, it's really how I would go about this that I'm having problems with.

I am pretty techy so am comfortable with some web and server programming but I'm not really looking to do this as a way of learning a new language so the easier, more out-of-the-box solution the better!

So, I'm interested in seeing examples of how this thing has been done before, as it must surely have been. Extra points for examples with technical explanations of how it's been done (i.e. via such and such API, with Javascript, or using Ruby on Rails)!

Many thanks.

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network?

macinchik — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:46:17 -0800

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network? I'm in the exact same situation as the person who asked this question on the topic, more than a year ago.

To summarize: "I need to find networked photo management software, similar in function to Picasa or ACDSee, but with the ability to share "tags" between multiple users over a network. The products I've been able to find all allow tagging, but those tags are available only to that user, and my company needs to search the photo tags without each user having tagged each photo individually."

Is iView still the way to go? It seems likely but I must say I am hesitant to adopt it since it was recently acquired by Microsoft. There's something called Portfolio Server but it is out of our price range.

Do programs like Aperture, Bridge, Lightroom, etc., allow you to edit metadata "within" the photo files, so that if a group of people keeps their photos on a shared drive, those photos will indeed begin to collaboratively accumulate tags and other sorting information?

Searching using tags and search folders in Outlook web access

ajp — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:00:11 -0800

How best to use search folders with categories to search through Gmail-style tags, in Outlook? For various reasons, I'm attempting to implement some form of "tagging" using Outlook 2003.

There are plenty of guides on the web for people who've tried to do this. They all involve creating categories as the tags, and search folders to find them. This I have done, and so far, so good.

However.

Let's say I have a "projects" tag (category), and then multiple separate tags per project. So I may want a search folder to contain all emails for "Projects AND ProjectOne". Unfortunately, search folders do "Projects OR ProjectOne", thus returning any emails tagged with Projects, ProjectOne, ProjectTwo, ProjectThree etc. Not so good. I need a separate folder for each of ProjectOne, ProjectTwo, etc.

I could get around this by disposing of the "Project" tag, but I'd prefer to keep it.

There is a way around this in the desktop client, using views. Here's the recipe: select the search folder, then select from the menu: View | Arrange by | Custom... In the dialog, select "Filter", then select the "More choices" tab, then click the "Categories" tab. Select multiple categories, click OK, then select the SQL tab. Select the checkmark so you can edit it, then change any ORs to ANDs.

Hey presto! Fixed. The search folder for "Project AND ProjectOne" now contains only those emails, and none from the other projects.

However (again).

This doesn't appear to work in web access. The search folders are visible, no problem. But the view settings are gone. The folder reverts to ORing not ANDing the tags.

So the question is: can I get "tag1 AND tag2" (not "tag1 OR tag2") working in search folders, in web access as well as in the desktop client?

A few pre-emptive notes:

Yes, I really want to do this.
Yes, it has to work in web access too.
No, I can't install any fancy software like taglocity. It has to be a "native" Outlook solution. I'm running windows XP and I'm not interested in the Windows desktop search thingy.

Muchos gracias for any suggestions. If I work it out, I'll post the answer here.

No more sweet music.

Skyanth — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:44:53 -0800

Say I wanted to fill the genre tags of my whole mp3 library automatically. Say I trusted the last.fm community enough to use the three most used tags for a certain song/album listed there (for example: New Order's Ceremony would get "80s" "new wave" and "post-punk"). Say I wanted to do this automatically. Say I had a Mac. How would I go about this? I hate that none of the software I know adds genre tags automatically. And yeah, I know that people think differently about different genres, but I'm willing to overlook that and just go for the most common genre "opinion" for now. This seems like a nice solution - I know it would go wrong on occasions, but it seems quite accurate overall.

I know /some/ Ruby. I'm not really proficient at it, but I could learn. Or can you think of a better way?

How can I annotate and tag text within multiple documents, so that I can categorize and search through my annotations later?

lunchbox — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:41:30 -0800

How can I annotate and tag text within multiple documents, so that I can categorize and search through my annotations later? I would like to do an academic project that involves investigating how the meaning of a particular phrase has changed over time. Basically, there is a particular phrase that is used in legal settings (e.g. court), and I suspect that its meaning has changed over the years (i.e. people are throwing it around more loosely these days, and it has come to mean several different things).

I want to analyze the way this term has evolved, using several thousands of pages of court documents as my data set. Ideally, I (or a friend) would go through the documents and "tag" every occurrence of this term with a label that describes how the term was used. Later, I want to be able to filter through this list so that I can see all occurrences in one category, and then the next, and so on. So basically I want to have something along the lines of del.icio.us, except I'm tagging text snippets instead of URLs. Make sense?

Is there any existing solution for this that you guys can think of? I dug around and found WordSmith/Concordance, TextSTAT, and a few other similar concordance programs, but they don't have the flexibility with tagging and so on that I'm looking for. I know how to program, but want to make sure first that there's no existing solution to this.

Any further ideas? (Feel free to suggest if you might have a better general approach, too!)

Stupidly Simple Recipe Management

SansPoint — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:17:36 -0800

What's a good, idiot-proof way for my mom to scan and manage her old recipes on her iMac? My mom has a shiny new iMac and a shiny new multi-function printer. She also has scads upon scads of recipes on cards and in magazines and things that she wants to scan in.

I set her up with Yep!, but it's too complicated for her. What she would love is just the ability scan stuff and sort through it, and make it as STUPIDLY simple as possible.

Suggestions? Solutions?

Tag relevance voting on amazon.com

bz — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:39:06 -0800

I'm doing some research, a timeline, on the evolution of user-experience on the web. I know, via AskMeFi (thank you!) that it was late in 2005 when amazon.com began testing tagging in general but does anyone know, specifically, when amazon.com began allowing users to flag or vote on the relevance of individual tags?

photo tagging software?

Popcorn — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:45:33 -0800

What is a good program (preferably free) that I can use to embed tags in my photo collection? I'd like to tag my photos in an embedded fashion so that I can organize them without messing with the existing folder structure. (Although it would be nice to be able to alter the dir structure based on the tags if need be). I'd like to tag them in some widely used scheme that is portable, kinda like ID3 on mp3's.

The picasa interface seems ideal to me but it seems that you can only use one tag per photo and the tags are not embedded.

Is there any thing like this out there that meets the requirements?