Hello all - some user-suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
As a mere “carry-over” from my naming regime in Finder, all documents in my DTP db, are named as follows: Jurisdiction_Author_Title of article_Date of publication(Year)
I then use smart-groups to sort according to the “Date of publication(Year)” - and this works adequately.
For instance, assuming I want to check which recent articles about [YYY] are to be found in my UK group - I can pop over to the “2010-2013” smartgroup.
My problem:
Unless I am mistaken - you cannot search through a smartgroup. At least - my calling up the search menu, does not allow me to tell it to “search in” that particular smartgroup.
And when I am ‘in’ the smartgroup [i.e. when I select it, and am viewing its contents] - I also cannot find a suitable manner to ‘search’ through that group, for a particular ‘tag’ - by example, assuming I wanted to see which textbooks in my UK group were published in the last 3 years - I cannot seem to filter for only the “textbook UK” tag, when ‘inside’ the “2010-2013” smartgroup.
Further to this - calling up tag-view, and selecting the “textbook UK” tag, doesn’t help - since it throws up all 191 instances, and since I cannot ‘sort’ the name bar, given that “_Date of Publication(Year)” is at the ‘end’ of the name string - I cannot distinguish between new textbook documents, and old textbook documents.
So what I end up doing, is calling up a search in the UK Data group, for names containing “_2010 or 2011 or _2012 or _2013” AND the “textbook UK” tag – this does the trick. But then I end up wondering that if I need to call up a specific search each time, then I may as well not have smartgroups in the first place, divided according to year…
Which now has me wondering - what do other DTP users do? How do you all incorporate the “date” of a document, with that document?
Do you –
a.) have it in the actual “name”;
b.) tag it (and if so - don’t you have a problem with a proliferation of tags?);
c.) use some other form of metadata - i.e. the spotlight comment field?;
d.) rely on the group you store the file in?;
e.) something else entirely?
I’m not too concerned about the above with my current DB, since as mentioned - I have a workaround - but would obviously prefer to settle on a best-practice approach going forward…
I realise there is not “right” answer to my query - but would still love to hear how others, who need to/rely extensively on ‘dates of documents’ go about naming/storing their documents…
