Windows 7, Making Libraries Cool
Posted on 17. Jan, 2009 by Mike Halsey in windows 7
For many people finding files buried on your hard drive is a pain. I’m one of the lucky ones, I’ve always sorted files into appropriately named folders and had a logical folder structure to help me find what I want easily. But my friends will tell you I’m a neat freak and even this doesn’t always help me find what I’m looking for.
With Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced new ways of sorting, oganising and finding files. They gave us customisable saved searches that we could open as normal folders, we could tag all our documents with keywords to kelp us find them, or rate them on how important they were. Finally they bound it all together with a new indexing service.
The tags are the important bit here, especially when it comes to music and photos. We’re all now used to tags (also called metadata) in music files that tell us the Artist, Track Name, Release Dateand so on. This information is downloaded with your music or downloadable easily from within Windows Media Player or iTunes.
With photos and pictures it’s harder because you have to add all the tags yourself. Software such as Windows Live Photo Gallery makes this task much less arduous, allowing you to select multiple photos to tag them simultaneously, showing a clear category view of your current tags, and allowing you to hide the images you’ve already done. Even so, this job can take a huge amount of time.
Also with Vista the photo import wizard that pops up when you plug in your digital camera allows you to tag photos there and then, which makes life much simpler unless you’re using proprietary software that came with your camera.
Suffice to say it’s worth tagging your files. For complete details on how to do this please refer to my free Power Users Guide for Windows Vista.
With Windows 7, Microsoft have taken things a stage further with aggregated file access in the form of the new libraries. These are special folders for Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos and you can create more custom libraries of your own, that allow you to access every file on your computer from a single location.
By default these folders only watch the standard user and public folders, but it’s a simple task to add new watch folders to a library. You might ask what use is a folder that contains hundreds, maybe thousands of random files, this is where your tagging comes in. I created a new library that I called Photos (click on the image below to view it full size) just for all my photographs.
Because I’ve added tags to all my images I’m able to group them by the tags. This means that every photo I’ve taken of say, Brighton, is viewable in one location regardless of what folder it’s stored in. The original file is still in the folder you put it in, it’s not moved but this new aggregated folder view will be an enormous time saver for an awful lot of people.
There’s still more that could be done. For instance I’d like to be able to filter the contents of folders more depending on their content. Let’s say for instance that you want a library that only contains information about household bills and related information. This would implement a saved search-like functionality to build the library based on both the folder locations and key words within the contents of the files themselves.
In the mean time though, I’m extremely impressed with the new libraries view. I’ll finish though with a word to those people concerned about (cough) private pictures and files showing up… don’t worry, you can exclude whatever you like.
it with others, or 
The Long Climb » Windows 7 and the death of search
Feb 15th, 2009
[...] Windows 7 they’ve taken things a step further with Libraries, single simple to use locations in which you can find all your files, regardless of which folder or [...]