Filechute dropbox8/5/2023 It may take some work - maybe a lot of work - to get there, but surely it’s at least worth thinking about it. A well-executed tag-based architecture can eliminate so many of the headaches that come with the doomed enterprise of maintaining a complex taxonomy. In many ways, the app sucks, and like any large and complex software artifact, it is occasionally going to lock up, get slow, lose data, corrupt precious digital memories, or manifest bugs - but this is probably a good time to riff on the Churchillian trope: Photos.app is the worst possible photo management solution, except for all other photo management solutions…īut if we go back to the problem that originally motivated me to write my post - how to organize your Dropbox folder - I think this idea of literally throwing out the whole hierarchical filesystem abstraction is worthy of some serious consideration. I mean, I can get at the original files if I really need to, and letting the app abstract over all the messy details of tens of thousands of files with names like 49890870-2B89-482B-82AF-F70A4F98456A.jpeg, neatly surfacing the Exif-provided metadata, is a net win. Likewise, shoving my photos into an opaque package on disk managed by Apple’s Photos.app also works reasonably well. When thinking about alternatives, like storing files in databases, or looking them up by tags, they feel like solutions looking for a problem. People have been able to build quite large systems without much friction using this pattern. You establish your conventions, whether they be things like having a models/ folder or a utils/ folder, and sticking tests in a certain location, and so on, and get to work. Faint praise, you may say, but it’s true.įor example, in software projects - where I spend a lot of my time - the ability to reference files by paths has proven to be perfectly adequate. One of the reasons it is so dominant is precisely that: it’s not too bad. And the truth is, the current system is not even that bad. Moving away from it would only bring a world of hurt, requiring a bunch of broken things to be fixed or replaced with "equivalent but probably quite buggy at first" rewrites built on the new paradigm. For all its flaws, the path-based paradigm has been dominant ever since the early days of UNIX and its existence is assumed pervasively within our operating systems and applications. Now, even though I love the content addressable storage ideas embodied in programs like Git, I am not interested in coming up with an alternative filesystem that addresses items by content (ie. What’s interesting about that post is that it starts from the same problem ("fitting things into hierarchical structures is hard"), but arrives at a completely different destination - while my post modestly proposed a set of rules for living within a traditional filesystem, Nayuki proposes to reject hierarchical systems entirely and build something completely new. The other thing that happened is somebody shared with me their great blog post, "Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies". Having said this, however, the awkwardness of managing large numbers of symlinks means that I am unlikely to make much use of this. This means that you can make things appear in more than one place at a time, although it is quite cumbersome to do so: you create symbolic links (with ln -s) and in the Sync web interface and also on the iOS client those links will look and feel just like the source files that they point at. One interesting thing about Sync is that, even though symlinks are not "officially supported", they do work in quite a reasonable way. Although I moved on some time ago, I continue to see complaints about Dropbox, noting lack of support for Apple Silicon and excessive CPU usage even during periods of supposed inactivity. Unlike Dropbox, Sync looks focused on building a robust and secure file synchronization service, and not a bunch of stuff that I don’t want. Sync offers a simpler, more focused product that offers encrypted storage and hasn’t succumbed to the slow feature creep that seems to have infected Dropbox over the years. One is that I switched from Dropbox to Sync. Since then, a couple of things have changed. That post presents a bunch of heuristics to help you answer the vexing question of "where do I put my stuff" given a hierarchical structure in which any given item may only appear in exactly one place. A while ago I wrote about how to organize things inside your Dropbox folder.
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