Beginning with version 9.90 XYplorer offers tagging as a radically new approach to file management and alternative to the hierarchical tree-based file management. You can assign any number of tags to any file or folder. Yes, any file, not just media files.

Working from the Toolbar

The tags are stored between sessions, you can display them in a new column "Tags" in Details view, they can be shown in the File Info Tips, and you can Find Files by them (with all Boolean splendor, and extremely fast because these searches are indexed). Assigning tags can be comfortably done from a Tag List which can be popped using toolbar buttons.

Toolbar buttons to Add, Set (New), Remove, and Find tags. The buttons pop a tag list (aka "Tag Cloud") that is automatically and/or manually generated.

Working from the Tags tab

From v11.00 onwards the Info Panel (F12) features a Tags tab providing an intuitive all-in-one interface to adding, editing, and viewing the tags (Labels, Tags, and Comments).

The Tags tab in the Info Panel can be used vor viewing and editing tags. (Click to zoom)

Looking for Girls

Here's an example showing a couple of tagged files. The tags are shown alphabetically sorted in the Tags column. The File Info Tip on hovering the file shows the Label, Tags, and Comment information as well (optionally):

Now let's search for files with tag "girls". Simply select "girls" from the dropdown menu of the blue Find by Tags toolbar button. "Search Here" is ticked because we only want to search the current branch for now.

And here's all "girls" in the current branch:

Now let's search for "girls" everywhere. Tick "Search Everywhere" in the dropdown menu and then select "girls" once again.

And here's all "girls" in the whole computer. As you see some have been found on a network drive:

The complete search (over the whole computer!) took 32 milliseconds. Not bad.

Technical Background

The tags are stored in a database file named "tag.dat" located in the application data folder. This file is a normal text file (UTF-16LE encoded) which contains all data in an open, simple, and human-friendly format. You can open it in any text editor to check or even manually edit its contents. This makes it future-safe and accessible to other applications.

Links to Further Documentation