Tagging has become an invaluable way to help us organise and search our data but, as is usual in the IT world, none of the tagging systems work together.

I have been using a macbook as my main computer for just over a year now and have been delaying using any of the spotlight tagging as this is OS specific and if I decided to move to Linux all of my work will be lost. I have recently also switched from using Flickr as my main way of storing images on the web over to Google’s Picasa Web. There was no way of copying all the tags across so I had to recreate them all.

This brings me to the question in hand. Where do you, or indeed should you, be tagging? Do you find it easier to tag locally and recreate any tags on whatever web services you use or do you only tag online and leave local searching down to the good old methods of structured folders and remembering where you put that picture of Grandad asleep at the Christmas party?