Let’s dig a little deeper into foldier’s search function. We can start right away with a straightforward example:
music 1995
foldier will deliver all items that match both keywords.
We can do another search and ask foldier to retrieve items that match any of the two keywords. We’d change it to:
music OR 1995
Or, we can use the special operators AND, OR, NOT and parentheses to construct a more complex search. Like this:
(music AND (1995 OR 2005 ) )
foldier will deliver a list of items matching “music” and either “‘1995” or “2005“.
In each case, foldier finds the files through the tags associated with your items. And even if we didn’t add any tags when we linked the item to foldier, the system will create some of its own and use them in your future content searches.
foldier also uses another category of information: the item’s properties. Properties are metadata defined by pairs of names and values. For example:
Camera | Olympus
Artist | Madonna
Year | 1994
City | “San Francisco”
Like the tags, you can assign the item’s properties while foldier detects properties as well. For example, when we upload a photo to our AmazonS3 account within foldier, it triggers the detection of various EXIF metadata included in picture files — things like: Equipment Model, Date and Time, Resolution, IsoSpeed, etc. foldier converts these metadata to properties automatically.
We (or at least most of us) are big fans of Madonna and Dire Straits here at foldier. So this search:
Artist = Madonna OR Artist = “Dire Straits”
will detect all our items in which the Artist property is set to Madonna or to Dire Straits. We can also mix this syntax with the regular way of searching for tags. So,
Artist = Madonna AND mp3
will find all our Madonna mp3 songs.
foldier uses properties extensively to perform other tasks as well — by leveraging various descriptive features connected with your smart folders. Some examples:
On the account home page, the panel “My Main Folders” is actually just a smart folder itself. Its purpose is to search all your other folders that have the “MasterFolder” property category set to true.
The three media players available to your smart folders — slide show, music player and video player — are accessible to you when you set the “PictureFolder,” “MusicFolder” and “‘VideoFolder” property categories to true.
When you upload a file to your AmazonS3 account, foldier automatically detects the file’s metadata and creates appropriate smart folders to collect all the items with same property value. The picture below shows smart folders that were created automatically after we uploaded a picture taken in 2007 with an Olympus E-500 DSLR camera.
The foldier team
