Tagging is commonplace around blogs and websites, MakeUseOf too has its own tagcloud. We all agree that it’s a speedy way to scour out a web resource; nearly single click in its utility. We are so used to it that we perhaps miss it as a feature in Windows.

Windows XP was born much before Web 2.0 came about. So, there’s the easy explanation. Vista of course has file tagging and Vista Quick Search as a feature but with a leaning towards only Office docs and a few limitations for certain file types like TXT, RTF, and PNG etc. Even then with all ifs and buts, Vista’s search is better for it. Windows XP meanwhile lags behind, huffing and puffing in its file search.

To plug the want, there is always one or the other software. You might have tried out the previously mentioned TaggedFrog. Another of its type is Tag2Find.

There was a brief mention of it some time back. So, let’s take a closer look at how Tag2Find saves us XP users (why not Vista’s too?) some grunt work.

Tag2Find (ver. 0.10.2.5) is a 2.23 MB freeware that allows us to tag Windows files and make our search less tedious. According to the site, it’s still in the technical preview stage and the developers are looking to make further improvements.

The First Steps to Tag Windows Files

There are three pre-requisites for installing Tag2Find on your machine –

• Windows XP (Home, Professional) or Vista (32-bit)
• NET Runtime 2.0
• NTFS-formatted file system

For installation, you need administer privileges on your system. The installation runs through a few configuration screens for setting up the location of the internal tag database which stores all the tag info.

Another sequence of steps is for selecting the files/folders and the extensions you want to tag during the initial setup (The Intial Tagging Wizard). That done the installer shows a brief video clip revealing how tag2find should be used. Don’t worry, it’s a cinch.

Tag2find covers all locations that make it easy to tag Windows files – desktop, explorer toolbar, system tray and the right click context menu.

Quickie tagging…

During installation, the Initial Tagging Wizard helps out by letting you select the files, folders and extensions which you want to include in your tags. The wizard can be opened later on too.

You can tag your Windows files by a selection or a drag and drop using three different approaches –

• By a drag and drop on the Tag2Find explorer toolbar icon.
• By right-clicking on the selected file and using the context menu.
• By using the Floating Tag Box manually.

Going for any of these three processes opens up a Tag2Find window. The window displays the entire tag list, some suggested tags and info on the file that is to be tagged. Clicking on Details gives you additional file information and a preview if available.

Tag2Find also makes it simple for new files by actively monitoring selected file locations (watched folders). The New File Monitor pops up like an alert box and gives you a quick way to tag the file.

Find them out using tags

Tags wouldn’t be of much help if we don’t have an equally easy way of using tags to shortlist the files we want. Fill in the tag search term in the Tag2Find field box to display the files labeled by the tag in the Results Preview. Open the files from within the preview window or drag and drop it elsewhere. You can also view related tags by entering a comma after the first one. A plus is the graphical bar which is color coded to indicate the relative usage of the file in terms of the tag.

Get the big picture using the TagBrowser

The TagBrowser is like the centerpiece for all your tags. Browse, sort or filter your tags from the explorer like browser window. TagBrowser is also the tool for mass management of all  tags. Edit tags or set new ones for a bunch of files for rapid organization. One click filters easily set apart documents from other file types like movies and music.

What’s a tag without a tag cloud? The TagBrowser has the option of displaying all your tags either as a tag cloud (with the relative sizes for importance) or as a list.

This is not all there is to it the free software. Some little extras can be found within the settings for TagBrowser. Decide on the color of the tags, set the transparency of the Floating Tag Box, import export tags, auto-play and preview media files in TagBrowser or the tag detail pop-up make it quite a rounded application.

First impressions…

On first install and use, some users might just stop short, just because we are so used to web tags. The initial pause done away with, Tag2Find provides lots of flexible ways to tag all your files. Searching by tag is also snappy. It’s almost like an Explorer replacement… addition of an Explorer-like directory structure might just make it one. The PDF help file provided on the site makes the learning curve less acute. The beginning looks and feels good.

If you are an old XP hand (or even a Vista user), give file tagging with Tag2Find a shot. Who knows it might be the ticket for a better organized computer. Are you familiar with any other tool to tag Windows files? Let us know in comments!

Image Credit: rooneyjohn

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I accepted my James Bond-esque task equipped only with a memory stick and a very small application called SearchMyFiles from my favorite handy dandy developer NirSoft.

SearchMyFiles is a portable improvement over the standard Windows Search option. Not only can you be stealth about your activities but it is a portable app as well. So you can throw it on a memory stick and scan to your hearts content. This will work on all Windows Operating Systems 2000 or better.

You can download the application from here. There is an installable version as well but where is the fun in that? So after downloading and running the 40kb application I saw this screen:

Wow that’s a lot of options! So I quickly configured it to do my bidding as you can see below:

I configured it to search both local hard drives, excluding the Windows directory, return all files and folders created in the last 5 days. I hit OK and was on my way… Looking over my shoulder as I went. After about 5 minutes I saw what I was looking for…

Then I hit up View – HTML Report  – Selected Items and like that I was done… I saved the HTML file to my USB Drive and I was out.

I hate being the rat but my job is my job and this tool helped me do it. Upon removing my USB drive there was no trace of the search.

Do you have a tool that you live by? Couldn’t live without? Share it with us in the comments and let us know why it is so important to you!

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Soon after the early search days of AltaVista, Infoseek and Yahoo, Google took over. Google would not only find those same pages during the internet conception, but would essentially answer any question you want as well. Today, we still have all of that, but with Maps, News, Videos, and of course images.

Ginipic is an depth image search tool of not only your own entire image collection, but almost all of the major image hosting/sharing sites as well. This includes DeviantArt, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Google, Fotolio, Photobucket, and several others. The tool runs locally on your Windows PC and includes a very easy to use navigation tool.

First and foremost, the biggest and most important piece of Ginipic is the search portion. Having the ability to comb several image hosting sites in the matter of a few seconds makes life very easy when you’re searching for that next great photograph or graphic. The screenshot below gives you a better idea of how exactly the search works.

After finding something you’ve been searching for, you simply click on any particular image to quickly preview it before you accept your selection. From the preview window, you can share it on all of the major social networking sites, e-mail, save it, favorite it or set it as your desktop background.

The preview window is also where the drag-n-drop feature comes into play. From Ginipic you can simply select your picture from the window and drag it into any compatible image application.

Ginipic includes both a large sidebar window to search and preview, or a full screen mode. It includes windows wrapping so it never gets in the way, and when you’re done using it, you can have it continuously running in your system tray.

Ginipic is one of the first of its kind and works really well at what it’s main purpose is – meta image searching. Its incredibly fast search of not only your PC but essentially all of the web as well makes it a one of a kind of application that can come in handy in many situations for work or home.

What do you think? Do you have any similar desktop or web based image search engines that you use?im How do you see utilizing an application like Ginipic?

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Most often they are used on blogs but they are also used in various ways on social networking sites such as Delicious, news sites like Newsvine or even online stores like Amazon. Any site that generates regular or changing content will usually have some sort of tag system in place. So why just the web? Why can’t we have it on our PCs as well?

TaggedFrog is a simple and free file tagging app for Windows XP or Vista that allows for the easy addition of files to be tagged with as many descriptive keywords (tags) as you can possibly think of. You can then visualize them in a cloud display which looks very similar to your everyday cloud display you see on many websites today.

You first begin tagging the files by adding and managing the keywords you’d like to create for your files.

An easy drag and drop interface allows for the easy addition of any type of file, document or web link from your computer. Once they are added, you can simply add any of your created tags to that file.

So now, instead of renaming and changing files as they are created, you can quickly and easily add tags to them. This allows for easy filtering and searching of your hundreds of thousands of files.

Along with the tag cloud, you can also set up “favorites” for locating some of the more popular files and tags. If you’d prefer not to go through and tag all of your files manually, you can also set up options to go through your entire hard drive with the nice “Auto Scan and Tag” feature.

The simple and clean interface, and fast search capability of tags, makes TaggedFrog a great alternative to the Windows Vista launch bar, and MUCH better search alternative than on Windows XP. Adding tags in Vista can be very tedious and having a separate application to keep them organized can become very handy when files begin to pile up on your PC.

There are plenty of other search alternatives (Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, etc…) than a tagging application like this. But if you simply want better organization of files, instead of creating hundreds of directories, and you don’t want to bog down your computer with search indexing, then TaggedFrog is likely the right application for you.

What do you think of tagging files instead of simply searching? Are there any other file tagging applications for Windows that you use?

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There are better ways than combing though every folder on your hard drive. Simply search for it using a desktop search tool. But if you simply search for “desktop search” you’ll come up with dozens of different apps. These are some of the best.

Windows Search

Windows Vista actually has a decent desktop search software built in. Unlike previous built in search programs in Windows, Vista will automatically index your computer (XP can index, however you have to turn it on manually and it won’t remind you to start indexing until after your search, to turn it on simply open my computer, right click on your hard dive, usually C:, click properties and at the bottom, check the box that says Allow Indexing Service to…) and give you close to instant results.

However, it will not index what is inside the files like other desktop search programs but does consider folder names and other data.

You can also narrow it down by type of file, author, location, and date. From there, you can navigate the search results like a regular folder. To get to it, simply hit Start then start typing.

MakeUseOf had mentioned some tips on how to make most of new Windows Search in the past. Check them out.

Google Desktop Search

It’s probably a safe guess that most of you have heard of Google Desktop Search. It is a standard desktop search software with a few extra features. First, it has a side bar where you can put widgets (namely ones that connect with other Google services.) Second, it can integrate with Google’s standard web results, (i.e) you search for cheese and you wrote a report on cheese, both will show up when you Google “cheese”. And third, it can integrate with (and search) your other Google services (like GMail, Google Talk, etc).

The search interface is the exact same as Google’s web results, because you search inside your browser. The downside to this is that 1. it won’t give you real time results and 2. the preview “what’s inside the file” is limited.

However, Google Desktop Search’s biggest flaw (that I’ve found) is that it is not 64-bit compatible. To install it on a 64-bit system, you have to run a special command in the command line, and some features do not work.

Yahoo! Desktop Search

This product is now defunct and not provided by Yahoo! any more. So then why is it here? Because Yahoo! licensed X1’s search program to do this (X1 is an enterprise level desktop search developer and because from my experience, YDS indexes and searches the fastest. It indexes relatively quickly and also what’s inside of the files. The interface is excellent, you can search email, files, documents, music, etc. via tabs at the top of the screen.

When you start searching, it will instantly start showing results with your search phrase highlighted. Click on a file and you will see (to the side or at the bottom) a preview of the file, be a picture or document, with your search phrase highlighted in the document. And all of this is almost real time.

Though the last update was way back in 2005, Yahoo! Desktop Search is still a solid desktop search tool. How can one get a hold it since Yahoo doesn’t support it? Softpedia still has a link to it on their servers and at Yahoo!’s.

Locate32

The next two programs have a different approach to searching. Instead of taking 45 minutes to index what’s inside of all of your files, they take usually less than a few minutes indexing the names. Locate32 looks like the search app in Windows 95-2000, only it is much faster. Once you install it and run the database updater, the interface is fairly basic.

You can search by name, extension, or location. Clicking on one of the other two tabs will get you more advanced options such as minimum and maximum sizes, date modified (this is good for finding stuff that you’ve made or edited recently), match whole phrase, etc.

Locate32 might not be the best choice for the average user, but is great for the power searcher.

You can read more about it and check out additional screenshots in MakeUseOf’s Locate 32 review.

Everything

The name says it all – it searches everything. The indexing is fast, and I mean you blink and it’s done. Instead of the the GUI options that Locate has, things must be done with tags like a search engine, but for the most part works exactly like Locate. Except Everything will give you real time results as you type, like Yahoo! Desktop Search tool.

I’ve used Everything several times, not for full blown desktop search, but in a crisis where I need that file and I need it now!

Everything also has a portable version, for searching on the go.

That is how I find my missing files, how do you? Is there one that blows all of these away?

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Locate32 is a desktop seach tool that lets you search for files and folders on your hard drive and other locations with lightning speed. It uses databases to store information about directory structures and then utilizes them when you search for something. If this rings a bell and makes you think about Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop, then you are not far wrong except that Locate32 is a lot faster and lighter.

Locate32 is portable – you just extract the package (zip or exe) and you are ready to go. Since it uses a database to search the files, make sure that you create the first time database before you search for files. This may take a few minutes depending on your storage capacity.

Once the database is ready you can type in your queries and get instant results. Locate32 also offers you a variety of options while searching to streamline your search:

You can specify the name, wildcards, extension or directory to look in :

You can also specify the minimum or the maximum filesize criteria that the file must satisfy or you can specify the age of the file.

If you really require the advanced stuff, head on over to the advanced tab and you can specify whether you want to search the file names, folder names or both. The type of file i.e. archives, sound files, image files, source files, text files, documents, executables or the plain old search by extension.

Last but not least you can also search the text within the files for a particular word or phrase (which is a little time consuming).

Personally the results are so quick that I seldom specify any options. Just put in a substring that you remember to be in the file name, hit enter and boom the results are already there. If however you need a finely grained search than of course Locate32 provides you with all the options.

There are almost endless options for Locate32. I am going to leave it to you to check them out for yourself because there are simply so many of them. They range from search options to Windows menu integration to keyboard shortcuts to database update schedules.

Locate32 is one of those software apps that you must have on your computer. I highly recommend that you check it out and see if it fits your needs.

What software or features do you use for your searching needs? Would you make the switch to the very lightweight Locate32? Or have you been using the default Windows search or Google Desktop? Let us know in the comments.

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