Spotlight comments used like tags
One sweet thing about OS X 10.4 is the spotlight and more precisely, spotlight comments. It’s like tagging for for your computer files. But I am willing to bet that despite this uber coolness in OS X, most people do bother to use these spotlight comments, simply because it’s not a natural process to add them. In Finder you have to right-click (or control-click) the file, get info then add the comments in the appropriate field. That sucks, it’s slow, it’s too much work… therefore the average Joe will not bother.
I hate to be the ultimate Path Finder fan boy (though not ashamed to be so titled), but if you really want a productive experience on a mac, you have to lose the suck-ass Finder. Path Finder is all about productivity, and you can’t be productive if you can’t “Find” things quickly and easily, so making a key feature (spotlight comments) buried below the surface in Finder makes no sense at all. Enter Path Finder. I can’t remember what the default panel setting are for Path Finder but one key panel for me that always remains open and close to the action is the Attribute panel, the place where, among other things, you can set the file colors, name and of course the all important spotlight comments. I click on a file and there in the attribute panel directly below I add my spotlight comments.
By using the spotlight comments, you make the searching experience across the mac far more effective, but in addition you make searching using Path Finder invaluable. For example, my wife and I are working on a multimedia project that involves thousands of pictures. It is easiest and quickest if we just pull the images out of our camera, iPhoto, of off the web and leave them named as is, but sorting through them and picking the ones to be used here of there is a little tough. Renaming everyone with a name that applies to what we would like to use the image for would be even more daunting as no two files can have the same name. But adding a few ‘tags‘ or spotlight comments to each image as as browse through is both easy and quick and we can repeat ourselves as often as we want. When it comes time to find the images we need for the ‘party‘ section, for example, we use the “spotlight > selection” in the Path Finder search field and filter out all the files containing the ‘party‘ spotlight comment. Boom, done!
[tags]Path Finder, OS X 10.4, Tiger, Finder[/tags]