Tag any files, not only images, audio and such

[I Am User]

Hello. I am discovering organization options to further improve my already good organization, and I came along tags. If I'm not mistaking, tags can only be assigned to things such as images, videos, music files, and even not to all forms of those. So if I, say, want to add tags to my .psd files - is there some registry hack thing to make this possible? (I don't want a metadata editor, but I want to be able to edit tags within Windows' Explorer). Also, if it is possible, to tag folders. Thanks in advance, User

 

[MilesAhead]

I've played around with commenting files in Explorer off and on ever since I saw a utility to do it as a shell extension(I think it was by Neil J. Rubenking of PC Magazine.) Anyway, I wrote my own version. But having it "global" by using the entire path to the file as key, had a big drawback. When you copy a folder someplace else the drive letter or folder path may change.

So my latest program for commenting, or tagging if you prefer, is hotkey based. It allows you to use "global" mode but I recommend local since it avoids the drive letter/path issue.

You may try it and see if it's useful to you. As with all my downloads it is free for you to use at your own risk. It is named CommentExplorer and may be downloaded here:
Miles Ahead Software

Please read the About info and included Readme.txt rather than posting questions here.

But the basic scheme is, once you comment a file, when you Arrow to it in Explorer so that it is the selected file, a Tooltip shows the comment. You may add/edit comments using hotkeys. In "local" folder mode it creates a file in each folder that a comment is created in.

Unfortunately it does not comment folders.

Edit: This type of feature will probably never be implemented seamlessly in Windows because it really needs to be built into the file system. Not tacked on afterward. All the implementations I've looked at were kludges for this reason. My Property Page implementation was essentially a reimplementation of the Rubenking approach. You could enter a comment as long as 4 kb, but to do so required right click on file, click Properties, then click Comment Tab. Then enter text. Too many clicks. So I went with this more direct concise approach.

Edit2: Another drawback to the Property Page method is that it is implemented as an Explorer Shell Extension. Now that things are split between 32 and 64 bit Windows, it makes shell extension implementation even more problematic since the "bitnss" of Explorer has to match that of the DLL. A nightmare.