TaggedFrog is a free utility that allows you to tag any files on your hard disk by keyword and access or filter them through a tag cloud. Users can also create filters by file-type to filter their results, and create favorite “sets” or combinations of tags for quick browsing.
File tagging is one of those simple, straightforward ideas that make me wonder why it is not simply built into the operating system to begin with. Of late we have seen some progress made on the photo tagging front, with many image viewers now incorporating tagging as part of their default set of features. TaggedFrog will tag images but goes further to tagging any and every file on your hard drive.
If you still need some examples as to how this could be useful consider the following two examples.
- You are working on two projects that relate to multiple clients. You could tag every file that is connected to these (such as PDF’s, “Office” files, images, etc.) such as to be able to easily and instantly retrieve all files relating to “Project A” or”client X” (or both) for example.
- I download a lot of software. I can now tag the downloaded files by their perceived review priority (high/med/low), by their subject matter “PDF editors”, “Image Viewer”, etc, and other tags such as “Featured Article”, etc.
Here are more notes on this program:
- The user interface: looks very polished and sleek but takes a little getting used to. Should have been more user friendly, really, but you will soon get the hang of it. TaggedFrog is a standalone program that does not integrate into the context menu or the filesystem.
- What is tagged: you can tag any type of file, irrespective of where it resides on your hard drive. Tagging is done by dragging and dropping your files into the interface (or dragging already-tagged-files back to the upper pane to tag them further). Folders cannot be tagged.
- The tags: can be anything that you type in. If you type in multiple words TaggedFrog will assume each word is a distinct tag unless you surround them with quotes (e.g. “project alpha” with the quotes is a single tag).
- Filters: these are groups of file extensions (e.g. “.zip, .rar, .cab, .7z”) that can be used to further filter your results. So for example say you click on “ebooks” then “comics” in your tag cloud, you could then filter the resulting set further by, say, PDF or “.CBZ, .CBR” if you are looking for that particular type of ebook.
- Favorites: are merely a collection of tags. You could set these up so you could quickly access them in the sidebar.
- Tag cloud: note that the size of the labels in the tag cloud by default is dependent on your most commonly used tags (i.e. the tags you click on the most will grow largest). You could change this in the settings to reflect the number of entries that exists for each tag instead.
- Memory consumption: takes up anywhere between 30 to 40 megs but this program uses the .NET framework and therefore its memory consumption is
inflated as a consequence. - Portable version: is available (although the program requires the .NET framework to be installed in order to run).
Wish list (or how this program can be even better)
- Context Menu integration: it would be cool if you could right-click on a file or files and select “tag these”, prompting a little dialog where you could type in or check the tags you want.
- Adding a “tags” column in Windows Explorer: so you could see the tags for your files straight from the “details” Explorer files view.
- The ability to drag a folder to tag all of its contents: currently, you have to go inside the folder, select all, then drag the individual files to the program interface to tag them.
The verdict: this is a very nice program that performs a function that is very needed and delivers what it sets out to do quite competently.
I would have liked a more streamlined interface and more little more Windows Explorer integration, although ironically I might prefer this program to previously reviewed Tag2Find (another freeware tagging program) precisely because the latter pushes itself a little too much into Windows Explorer and the desktop environment.
Depending on how you organize your files this program may be very useful. Check it out!
Version Tested: 0.6 beta
Compatibility: Windows XP SP2 or Vista. Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer. (This is already pre-installed in Vista).
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 860K).
Maybe you should give HobComment a try. It has Context Menu integration and shows the tags/comments in a column in Windows Explorer.
@ust.it
I actually do personally use HobComment for a long time now. Reviewed it way back: http://www.freewaregenius.com/2006/12/16/hobcomment/
The thing about HobComment though is that it has no database-style functions, such as filtering or searching. If I wanted all the files that I have “tagged” by certain keyword in the comments section I cannot retrieve them.
Thank you for your reasonable review!
I just want to add some words: context menu integration and folders support are in my TODO list and these features will be definitely supported by TaggedFrog before version 1.0, as well as some other nice features.
Good review, this is a type of application I have often thought about installing, as I feel Explorer is lacking in this area.
Here is my ideal application:
The most important feature of such an app for me, is that it blends with the OS. This TaggedFrog seems to have a nice main program interface for browsing tags etc, BUT if I have to start a program just to tag one single file, I probably won’t care to tag stuff often enough, and then the application has no use.
- Yes, a context menu could be a solution if it cascades (only takes up 1 slot on top of context menu), and isn’t slow.
- However, I picture having an additional toolbar or maybe 2-3 buttons one can add to existing Explorer toolbars:
* Button 1: Filter contents of a folder by tag, which gives a dropdown of every tag present in that folder or subfolder. Sort by standard Explorer sort-setting.
* Button 2: New item in “Sort by”, namely “Sort by tag”. Same behaviour as clicking the tag column header. If one could sort by tag primarily, and then sort by type/name secondly it would be perfect.
* Textfield 1: A mini input field which can be used for both filtering and adding tags. Choose to either filter folder contents (by tag or filename) and match against the entered text, or choose to add the entered text as tag for selected files/folders
The additional Explorer column for tags is also a must, and I feel it should list several tags for each file/folder. These tags could be hyperlinked so clicking a tag filters the view by that tag. Users can define the importance of tags, so for files the tags will be listed by importance, whilst for folders which tags are displayed first in the tag-column is determined by usage/frequency of each tag in the (sub)folder. I realize that this does require a lot of querying, but the FolderSize project ( http://foldersize.sourceforge.net ) does this in a smart way with a running service which I think can be used by this app as well.
If you had all these features working seamlessly, I would definately be willing to donate for maintaining it (and probably buy it, but this is a freeware site after all).
Do you know if the tags are stored in a separate database, or with the file itself?
I find the approach of http://www.itagsoftware.com/ the best, and the tags are stored with the file (but this only tags photo’s and video) and then a search is done to build a tag cloud/index. Moving files (or computers) your tags still exist.
The mac’s have a number that work this way, http://tagamac.com/ but I can’t find a PC equivalent??
Thanx, I was looking for something like taggedfrog and even posted about tagging a few days ago after Ultrafolder which I was using a while ago died. I mentioned the same about tag2find, tag2find even adds a system service, a bit much.
My IntelliType Keyboard kept craching (and restarting) as soon as I ran this prorgam. Nothing too too serious, but anoying. I used the zip/portable version.
Function such as database and filter should be present.
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Works well in 64-bit Vista. I am looking forward to this proggie being very useful.
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The PC Rat
Hi Samer, I really like your site and am thankful for all of the research you share with us.
Do you happen to know if the tags stay with the file? For example, if you tag a photo with taggedfrog, then opened that photo in picasa or tag2find, would the tag(s) you associated with that photo appear in those programs also?
Thanks – Rich
@ Rich,
I don’t know, but I expect not. At this point I do not have any of these programs installed on my new Windows 7 machine, so I cannot test. I would be curious to know if you find out.
http://tagstore.org is a *research* software for Windows, OS X and Linux that integrates tags into the file system in order to be compatible with *any* application out there: you can even use tags for navigation within file save/open dialoges.
Tagging is done by putting a file into the tagstore storage folder: a easy to use tagging dialog pops up.
If you want to get the software, write at [email protected] and I’ll come back to you!