I hate the "Libraries" bring back "My Computer"

OK, I have a question about libraries. Music, photos, that's nice, but can they be actually useful for work? Can one make a library of pdf files for instance - say, journal articles - and then sort them by authors, titles, keywords, etc. without having to manually create tags for these files (that would be a very time-consuming task for anyone with a sizable collection of such pdf files)?

Look, the issue of Libraries & Win Explorer design changes in Win7 amounts to simply an unexpected & unnecessary change from the system employed in the worlds most popular OS - XP!
That does not mean that XP is superior in these respects, simply that millions of people were 100% familiar & happy with the XP Win Explorer design, albeit that Win explorer did have its functional problems.
So whilst for many, Libraries may be a great new idea, which they are ready to spend time exploring, that will not universally be the case.
This can be simply resolved by providing to switch off libraries (without a detailed two step tutorial involving registry editing), but did MS consider this - apparently not.
It has been said that we should not expect MS to provide this sort of option every time a change in OS is deployed & I agree.
In this case however, as with some other changes, it should have been considered, or at the very least a software change package should have been released by now.
If that had been done we would all know the relative merits of Libraries simply by the number of SW modification downloads.
As for those posting who see little difference in Win7 Explorer (other than Libraries) I suggest they are not people who ever used XP Explorer much in the first place.
Apart from anything else the sickly baby blue colours of the Explorer window are awful, the lighter shades employed are just difficult to see in daylight.
Fort an advanced OS (yes I like Win7) this is just not an acceptable solution for the file gurus amongst us.
Peter O

Skin it.
This is what my explorer looks like:

Link to theme

peterlonz said:

Look, the issue of Libraries & Win Explorer design changes in Win7 amounts to simply an unexpected & unnecessary change from the system employed in the worlds most popular OS - XP!

This can be simply resolved by providing to switch off libraries (without a detailed two step tutorial involving registry editing), but did MS consider this - apparently not.

As for those posting who see little difference in Win7 Explorer (other than Libraries) I suggest they are not people who ever used XP Explorer much in the first place.
Apart from anything else the sickly baby blue colours of the Explorer window are awful, the lighter shades employed are just difficult to see in daylight.

Peter O

Well, again, I don't see what the removal of Libraries will do, except for saving a line in the navigation pane! So, those who don't like them can simply ignore them, don't see any problem with that.

I personally do not have any blue colors in Explorer - I chose a different theme, so I'm happy with my colors.

There seems to be an extra bar now, with Organize, Include in library, Share with and so on, which actually changes based on the folder type. That one I would be happy to remove, or at least be able to hide it, like I hide the ribbon in Office. As far as functionality of course this does not change anything. It might be that I am not an Explorer guru, but I don't see what could you do with XP Explorer that you can't do with Explorer in 7 (it's possible that the number of clicks needed to perform some tasks has changed, but I don't care for that one).

I've said many times that the people who do not like Libraries have not taken the time to understand it or try it, and I stand by that statement. For the sake of those of us that love it, please back off. No functionality has been removed. You can do anything you did before Libraries.

MacGyvr said:

I've said many times that the people who do not like Libraries have not taken the time to understand it or try it, and I stand by that statement. For the sake of those of us that love it, please back off. No functionality has been removed. You can do anything you did before Libraries.

I will not back off, I will revert to an OS that allows me control of my destiny, because of the fact that when saving any document it defaults to libraries, at least if it defaulted to my computer I could save 3 clicks to get to the location I would prefer instead W7 thinks we all need help and are too stupid to figure out where we should put our files, and that we are so stupid that we will scatter all of our files all over our C:/ and we will of course have to have a libraries function to find and organize all of the files we have misplaced since we are all little children incapable of any organizational abilities who all have at least 3 “New Folder” icons on our desktop and in every accessible folder location on the system, I have determined after 4 months of experimenting with W7 that it was created for people that have never had a computer or the changes that were made to the system were at the request of a handful of people who wanted windows to be more like apple and as many have pointed out a simple On/Off switch of the libraries function would have simplified many people’s lives, as for the comment that windows cannot comply with this function – they have in the past added switches for “window Classic view” or category view, I have all of my music in one folder on a NAS drive called music, using the libraries function it will not help me search and sort by genre because I have a program that removes all of the ID tags on my songs (therefore they are untraceable) because I do not listen by genre, I am in the process of ordering a new PC and I will order it with XP Pro, if you pay close attention to the primary complaints on this site – they are directly or indirectly related to the libraries function pathway, these complaints were never present in XP they are exclusive to W7 and the primary difference between the 2 systems is, for the better – enhanced security, and for the worse libraries, I am the OP of this thread and it will be hard to convince me that W7 is an improvement of XP which has had 9 years of testing and tweaking to get the bugs out, I have not meet a single XP veteran that has abandoned XP after trying W7, instead they are opting for a faster machine with a tried and true system, so far the only people that are happy with W7 are those that had VISTA, and you know what we all said exactly the same thing when we bought Windows ME, we said please give me anything but this, mark my words there will be a new system quite soon that will be a meld of XP & W7 and it will give costumers what they want – the ability to decide for themselves how to handle file management and the next gen of PCs will have a flash memory C:/ and the only thing that will be on it is the OS and he Programs.

Libraries are an awesome feature, just like everything else in Windows 7. I hate XP; it's fugly and unusable. Windows 7 FTW.