@Escubaer Ok. I think I see your point. Though I must say can’t say I see many benefits with it - at all, frankly. Since you said you can’t really understand why some people is reluctant to tag and labels for organization, I can write a few of these points out for you:
If no folder structure is deemed beneficial, then one might as well just throw all files (documents, PDFs, images, videos) into 1 folder, call that folder “Files”, and never go into that folder visually, right? Just search out the desired files using tags?
But if a folder structure is beneficial, in any way at all, then one might as well use that for orientation instead of tags.
That way I also won’t be dependent on however users actually remembered to tag their files or not, or if they misspelled their tags or put the wrong type of tags in etc. I mean, users will have to tag an audio file “audio”, even though the file extension (wav, aif, mp3 etc) is already searchable. There are way too many open doors for errors to slip in through that way.
How do you use versioning with tags? Since a document can only be found by tags, you’d have to add the version as a new tag too, right? Press-release, Press-release update, press-release update 2, press-release update 3 etc. It begs for mistakes too.
Folders also give you a way of exploring visually, going through and building the same idea of a structure in your head as the other users/personnel have, so you can speak on the same terms with others. Searching using tags won’t give you that. It’s more like operating a command prompt, you get no sense of structure or organization, just a different row of resulting files depending on how you formulate a search term.
And you won’t actually know if there are physical files out there, in the unknown cyberstorage, that haven’t been tagged properly and therefore lies forgotten, virtually invisible (to a tag search). With a folder system, you visually see all files. But with a tag system you only see what is tagged, and only if they are tagged properly too. You may have tons of rouge forgotten files around without knowing it.
Tags makes it hard for a new user too, who cannot know what to search for. They are not familiar with what tags and label to search for, what the present term-system is. I would have to give them a glossary of terms/tags which will provide them with desired results. And I would have to teach them how to save tags into all newly created files too.
With a folder system for organization, not even a 7-year-old needs any form of introduction. It is infinitely less BS, intuitive and direct. Using folders for orientation is using our eyes, the sense we use for 90% of our informational intake. It’s why Microsoft upgraded DOS into visual Windows, to interact with the computer though. Tags however, uses almost no visuals, and almost only memory.
Sharing files with other becomes equally difficult. If you store files with no folder structure, and you are then asked to share all files of a specific concern with a specific user, (different files types too) , you’d probably have to go through each concerned file and share it one by one. And as a result, the other user will then see lots of separate files (the shared files) in his root directory, with no visual structure and under no folder.
With a folder structure however, the structure is already in place. All you do is share the concerned folder, and the other user will see the same thing as you. Done.
Those are a few of the problems I see with using a tag system instead of a folder structure, and why I don’t find it beneficial to use. Tags may be used as a complement though.
I am currently back experimenting with different encryption options, so I can perhaps somehow use the Group Folder option anyway. Group Folders make it rather easy to maintain the existing folder structure even through sharing, but Group Folders don’t work well with different storage encryptions, even though I plan to store everything on site and not use external storage.