How do you make sure things are tagged properly though? A file must reside within a folder, even if it's a default ___location, which forces a user to think about the folder where the file is stored. With tags, a user could very easily forget one tag on a file, and now any filtering on that tag is never going to be aware of the new file existing.
What if you find another picture somewhere from your <Paris> trip, but you forget to add the <Travel> tag? Or you have a tag for "cool architecture pics" or something and you miss tagging one of your Paris pics with this when you upload?
There just seems like so much friction in properly keeping tags organized, despite how much extremely better the "read" UI is for someone browsing or searching file collections.
I imagine the process as being similar to how you would currently add a file.
Now:
Your friend messages you "Here's another pic from Paris xxx". You click on the picture, "Save as". Your file system comes up, you navigate to benjammer/travel/paris/pics. You can see the rest of the pictures from Paris in the directory. You hit save.
With tags:
Your friend messages you "Eiffel Tower :-)". You click on the picture, "Save as". A list of your tags comes up for you to select some. On the other side of the screen are the files that match the selected tags, so that you can see what company your file is going to end up in. They're shown in the order of how many files they tag (that also have the tags you've already selected). The "benjammer" tag is selected by default, as is "picture" and "png" (because your application knows it's been given a png). The "Paris" tag isn't at the top of the list so you type it in and select it. Now "Travel" is at the top of your list of tags, so you add it, along with "June 2017" and "Europe".
Manual tags require a lot of curation and upkeep, but some "tags" are really just restatements of attributes or facts about a file, like search filters, e.g. ("Pictures downloaded from the web on 2018-04-05", "Files created during installation of World of Warcraft", "Files opened in the last two weeks").
In fact, a tag-based document filesystem is largely useless without powerful search, where tag keys and values can be searched at will.
I would probably use a hybrid of the two. Use the tag system for things I've tagged, and fall back to a regular filesystem for untagged files. That's basically how I have Steam setup. Most of my games are tagged, usually with multiple tags, and all untagged games just go under Games.
Once I got everything organized (via automation, not manually -- not necessarily relevant, though), keeping up on tagging new games became easy and quick.
I imagine there would be automation tools written for a tagging filesystem, that just "knows" a lot of common software, etc., and can get you started.
For picture they could read metadata for something as simple as Paris.
The tech is there to search for 'architecture' pics, Google Photos demonstrates it.
Of course there is the issue of who can see this data and that's not a small one. The recognition itself could run locally, but training data would still need to be mutualized.
And most apps would need to adapt and provide more metadata to your documents
What if you find another picture somewhere from your <Paris> trip, but you forget to add the <Travel> tag? Or you have a tag for "cool architecture pics" or something and you miss tagging one of your Paris pics with this when you upload?
There just seems like so much friction in properly keeping tags organized, despite how much extremely better the "read" UI is for someone browsing or searching file collections.