hierarchical folders vs. tags

Up to the newly released 1.1, I haven’t used tags. The flat structure didn’t fit my needs, so I went with nested folders instead. Although a bit limiting, not having the same content in different places, it still suited me better.

With nested tags, I can have both the hierarchical approach as well as access to the same item from different places. This makes it possible to store all items in a single folders, instead of many.

Now to my question (and I’m new to the Mac world, so the answer might be obvious): What are the limits of EF/OS X in terms of number of documents in a single folder? Is it better if I continue to make some sorting into different folders, just not so granular as before, or can I more or less have a single dropbox for everything?

/Anders

Personally, I use both folders and tags, because that’s how my brain works. I’ve tried to design EagleFiler so that it’s agnostic: you can use folders or tags, or both, or neither. In general, I don’t think there’s a problem putting everything in one folder. It matters at the OS level to some extent, in that the file system might not perform quite as well if you have tens of thousands of files in the same folder, but I don’t think this will be an issue for most people.

Well, yes. I won’t put everything in one folder, 'cause that would cause a mess in my brain as well. I just wonder if I’m better of with folders containg a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand items at the most.

Does it matter to EF’s performance, or is it just a matter of OS X’s limits?

There’s no deep relation to EF’s performance. It just matters in the sense that if you click on a folder containing a thousand items it will take fractionally longer for EagleFiler to sort and display them than if you click on a folder containing a hundred items. In most cases this probably wouldn’t be noticeable.