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Leap: the nirvana of digital filing

Since I last wrote about digital filing, I have found nirvana - Leap ($34, Ironic Software). Most filing solutions I have tried were either slow, proprietary or limited. Now that I have found Leap, I realise that other solutions try to do too much. Instead of organising files into a database with labels, Leap simply creates a good user interface for file tagging. It works as a finder, of sorts, with vastly improved search capabiliteis.

When you open the Leap’s main window, you can see your folder structure in the left hand toolbar. You can limit your view within that structure based on folders, file types and tags. There is a simple interface to add tags to a file, and you can move files around, create folders, and everything else you would expect from file management.

So, my filing behaviour has changed slightly. Instead of dropping a file I want to keep into Eaglefiler, or Yojimbo or any other database-style filing cabinet, I drop it into a folder, labelled inbox, which sits on my dock. When I empty my inbox daily, I drag reference files to the quick-tag dropspot. The file remains where it is, but has tags added. When finished, I drop the file into my “Filed” folder. Quick, no fuss. And vitally, no thinking time, no spinning beachball.

To find a file again, I can search using spotlight (tag structure can be customised for searching with spotlight), or I can drill down using Leap’s own interface. For example, I can choose, “PhD folder” “image files” and “tag:white_cell_stain” and see if you can figure out what I get. It integrates perfectly with quicklook, which makes it easy to know what you are dealing with.

The features:

1. Easy to customise - you can have an inbox, a filed box, sort by year date, whatever works for you.
2. Generous trial period.
3. Tags are not program specific. They are accessible by spotlight, and Quicksilver, and other tagging applications
4. Files are not duplicated, and remain in place. So if you want to have a file structure (as well as tagging) you can
5. Plays well with others, including Quicksilver, and Dropbox. For example, if I tag files in my shared dropbox, my husband can also search by those tags on his end
6. Looks great. Very similar look to itunes, so it has an “apple look” and thumbnails load quickly
7. Great tool for finding duplicates as it ignores folder structure
8. Almost every feature I recently requested in the next version of Finder.

This is only the 1.0 release, so there are some annoying glitches

1. Not all the file type groups work well
2. Keystrokes are still limited. For example, I can’t find a way to enter the tagging window using keystrokes
3. Some bugs remain, like you can’t edit the tags in the info window, although you can edit the file title
4. Moving files brings up an “Are you sure?” check every time. This is incredibly intrusive, especially as I move files routinely as part of my filing workflow (from inbox to filed, or trashing duplicates).

   I work around this by moving in groups as much as possible, and tagging files for deletion with “trash” so I can batch delete.

An example of how great this system is

For my PhD, I take a lot of digital images for analysis. Then I have to duplicate and rename those files so I can be blinded during analysis. This often means that I have multiple copies of the same image, with different names.

Rather than getting lost and confused, and analysing the images more than once, I now tag the images with the name of the experiment, digital magnification and the slide number. By searching on tags, I can easily discover duplicates, no matter what files they have wound up in. Although a simple thing, this has made manipulating and measuring images infinitely less complicated.

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