Should file management be automated or human-driven?

File Management Tags Automated vs. Manual?

If you’re in charge of managing the myriad of files for your company or organization, you’ve probably wondered if there’s a simpler way to keep them organized and accessible. Auto-generated tags, and adding in your own tags manually can go far in categorizing them. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. We’re going to take a look at how they work, as well as how they can improve the organization of all of your files, no matter where they may be, even if you don’t have a formal tagging system in place.

Tagging gives files greater meaning

Without file tagging, you only get to see a limited amount of information, as well as not having any sort of structured file arrangement. You may see the path, filename, date created, and who shared it, but beyond these general characteristics, you don’t get anything more that’s going to help you find them any quicker in the future.

Tagging goes beyond broad details giving specificity to each file. Keyword descriptors provide relevant details and context. Tags act as beacons, guiding someone through a list of files, towards exactly what they’re looking for.

A single file has a one to one relationship with a folder. Every instance of that file in other folders represents a repeat of that file. When you and your team members are duplicating files in multiple folders, managing them can get out of hand quickly.

File tagging gives a single file an entire web of different contexts it can exist in. Multiple files may share different tags, creating interrelationships and groupings not possible through traditional folders. Where non-tagged files and folders only provide a linear way of navigating through them, tagging provides an elegant network giving someone a variety of pathways in discovering them. Instead of a one to one relationship, you get a relationship of one file to many different categories it may be a part of. Tagging is an optimized system of file management that can be used across many realms of business.

📚 Use Case: Legal

There are many different documents that a law firm needs to keep track of. Boilerplate agreements for a client’s resellers, confidentiality agreements, deposition materials, intellectual property documents, purchase contracts, and real estate disputes, are just a few of the categories of documents they need to manage.

If a law firm utilizes tagging, it’s possible to keep these documents organized as well as to streamline the process of creating new contracts. Contract reference tags allow them to access similar past contracts and reuse parts of them when appropriate for new ones. Instead of creating each contract from scratch, they can use what has worked well in the past.

Tagging is a form of metadata

Metadata is information attached to a file that provides additional details about it. Streaming audio services like Spotify utilize metadata to classify and recommend songs for its users. Websites incorporate metadata in helping web crawlers determine what they’re about and give them a boost in organic search rankings. Metadata gives you the context of files and provides more specific details. It provides information that traditional naming conventions can’t, helping you recognize if they’re right for a given project.

Metadata makes files easy to discover. This prevents the dizzying amount of duplicate content that gets uploaded. Instead of a constant tide of redundant files shared so that those looking for them can have access to them, metadata makes files easy to find in the first place.

Manual versus automated tagging

Tagging, whether it’s done automatically or by hand makes file management a more straightforward process. Both of these types of creating metadata work well, but also have a few disadvantages if they’re the sole means of file management.

📚 Use Case: Marketing

With multitudes of campaigns, presentations, images, and other digital collateral, marketing teams have a wide variety of files to keep track of. Something like a PowerPoint presentation, which goes through multiple iterations, may exist in a confusing array of different versions and locations. It may be close to impossible to keep all of these different files straight. Inline reference tags make it easy to access an older version, to compare it to a current one.

Automated tagging

Automation gives you the power to dispense tags to huge amounts of files, all while sitting back and letting technology do the job for you. Your total time expenditure may be less than what it takes to write an email.

Automated tagging works through artificial intelligence. Natural language processing, image recognition, and machine learning behind the scenes have made auto-tagging a more precise process.

Content can be scanned through, with machine learning-powered technology generating appropriate tags based on the text. Recurring words that have relevance can be turned into tags through natural language processing. Frequently made searches by people, related to the content of a given file, can also inform the auto tags that are generated in the AI-powered method known as “wisdom of the crowd.”

Though the algorithms powering artificial intelligence have become more powerful and refined, machine learning isn’t without its flaws. Machine learning depends on the quality of training data that are fed into it. And the expanse of the human mind can realize insights about files that are impossible within the confines of digital neural networks.

Manual tagging

Machines can’t duplicate our imaginations and creativity. Manual tagging lets you come up with your own words and phrases, that may be more effective than what automated tagging comes up with. It gives you a lot more flexibility in developing a system that will work for you and your organization.

Manual tagging can be cumbersome, especially for huge amounts of files. Trying to wrangle 1000s of files, across multitudes of folders and cloud storage locations can be overwhelming.

And let’s face it, we as humans fall short when it comes to consistency. Not sticking to naming conventions, misspellings, and other variations can bring a sense of disorder only possible through human error.

Manual tagging is an ongoing process. You never get a break from maintaining what’s there and making sure that your teammates follow the set protocols. Sisyphus, that character from Greek mythology, may have been tasked with rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity, but he was never responsible for an ever-changing library of files and folders, which makes that rock he pushed seem tiny in comparison.

📚 Use Case: eCommerce

Diving into a directory deep with product SKU images in Google Drive or Dropbox to find the right images to put on an eCommerce website can be a dull and repetitive task when done manually. Automated tagging lets you find the images you need, quickly.

Contextual tagging and automation gives you a powerful one-two punch

For a more robust system in tagging and finding files, use auto-tagging and manual tagging together.

For the first iteration, let auto-tagging take care of most of the groundwork. You’ll get a solid round of relevant tags, giving a solid first layer of organization.

If you start organizing files through this process of automation, you can generally get up to 50% coverage or more of files that have the appropriate tags consistently applied to them. With half of your files tagged with a logical system in place, you’re already halfway there in drastically improving their organization.

From this auto-generated output, you’ll have something to look to in helping you manually tag these files. Automated tags are great for seeing how files are related and can help inspire tags of your own.

When we’re depending on ourselves or others, the margin of error becomes larger. It’s easy to forget to tag every file and stay consistent with naming conventions. Auto-tagging eliminates much of these human-guided mistakes.

Digitile empowers you in tagging and searching for files

Whatever your realm of business or type of organization, there are many files to be kept track of. Whether you want to tag presentations, images, videos, documents or any type of files Digitile’s Tag Management Platform makes it a quick process. With an intuitive interface, manual and automatic tagging has never been easier. And when it’s time to find particular files, you get an artificial intelligence-powered system that will deliver what you’re looking for no matter where they may be in the cloud.

Why spend the time and frustration in tracking down digital assets when Digitile provides you with a sure-fire system for keeping your files organized?

Tagging provides structure and hierarchy. With a system of organization in place, looking for files is a speedy process. Digitiles’s search provides a direct connection to all of the files you’re after for an enhanced way to search. Just type in the relevant terms and let Digitile take the lead.

Maybe you think that you have it all under control with a tidy sum of files in your company’s library. But every quarter more files are created. What seems manageable now can grow to chaotic proportions. Whether you have fifty files, or five thousand, the time to get started with file tagging is now.

Digitile gives you the capabilities of artificial intelligence guided auto-tagging, as well as letting you take charge in adding tags of your own to simplify your file management processes.

Through Digitile’s sophisticated system of tagging, and intuitive way to search and locate files, staying organized, and finding files will become a quick and easy task.