Quick File Tagging in OS X with Punakea (& Tagger)

Posted on June 26, 2008
Filed under Miscallaneous

Even though I am a little pedantic in some ways (like most engineers are, I suppose,) I always seem to have trouble organizing the files on my computer(s) with any kind of reasonable folder structure or naming convention. I often find myself desperately trying to find a specific file that I know I have somewhere but I’m not sure where, and sometimes I just want to find a bunch of files that are somehow related but not actually saved into the same folder. These are problems that tagging is trying to solve (and doing a reasonably good job at it, I might add.)

There are many solutions for tagging files for OS X and other platforms, but I’ve tried to be judicious about adopting any method or solution that would somehow seem like too much of a hack and not something that makes an effort to integrate into the OS. The file metadata system in OS X is something that I believe can be used to solve this issue, and Punakea, which is a tagging application that saves tags you add for files into their “Spotlight comments” metadata fields, was the first thing that seemed like something I should try. Well, I did try it, and quite liked it, so I started researching ways to make tagging files with it as quick and effortless as possible.

I wanted to be able to simply select a file in Finder, hit a keyboard shortcut to go into “tagging mode”, type in some tags, and hit another keyboard shortcut to save the tags into the file and leave the “tagging mode”. People have found quite effective ways to do this, most notably (in my opinion) by invoking Punakea’s tagger window via assigning a Finder shortcut for its “Tag File” service. This worked quite well, but I had a pet peeve about the fact that the tags field in Punakea’s tagger window was fully selected by default, which meant an extra “right arrow” key press to move the insertion point to the end of the list before starting to type in any extra tags. This, combined with the fact that I was eager to learn some more Objective-C, prompted me to write Tagger.

Tagger is a simple application that takes one file as an argument when it launches and allows you to edit its tags. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

Thanks to the lovely fact that Nudge:Nudge, the makers of Punakea, have released the tagging framework they use in Punakea as open source, I was able to just use that in Tagger as the basis for working with the tags. This fact also makes Tagger and Punakea (and also any other applications that use the same framework) inherently compatible. In future versions of Tagger I’ll probably try to work on adding alternative tag storage methods (a custom format for tags saved into Spotlight Comments is probably first on the list.)

I have set up a separate page on this site for Tagger, where you can find more info on how to use it, the changelogs for different versions, and of course the download links.

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