Tags are great as an adjunct to a thoughtful folder hierarchy, IMHO.
Links are great as part of that too, they can provide shortcuts.
Real-world use: I am an artist, and I have found that the best way to organize my work is with a series of yearly directories. If I begin a large, multi-year project, it goes in a directory within the year I start it; I'll make a link to it that lives next to all the yearly directories.
I also use OSX's tags a ton. Files get marked as 'in progress', 'complete', 'paid for', 'commission', and 'experiment' (and a few other things). When I want to decide what to work on in any particular day it's super easy to open up the saved search for "everything in progress" that I keep on my desktop; this shows me everything in those yearly directories that's marked as 'in progress', whether it's personal work, client work, whether it's part of a large multi-file project with its own folder hierarchy or just a single file in the yearly directory. I also have a saved search for 'commission'+'in progress' for those days when I know I want to work on clearing the commission queue. And whenever I spend some time just fooling around with different effects to create interesting looks, I'll save my scribblings with the 'experiment' tag; when I decide to use it later I can easily tell Illustrator to open a file, and look through the 'experiment' tag to find the file full of some crazy procedural explorations, regardless of how long ago I did it. This habit has saved me hours of digging for that one file where I did that cool trick once.
Trying to organize all the files in my artwork directory with just tags would be a total fucking nightmare, the subdirectory for a multi-year graphic novel has its own folder hierarchy that's several levels deep, and when I know that what I want to work on today is "getting the prepress files together for book 3 of the graphic novel" it's definitely great to be able to just hit the top-level link to the graphic novel directory, then go into "books", then "3", and have its own little file hierarchy in there.
Tags by themselves are not very good for serious organization, but they can be very good for pulling things out of a hierarchical structure. They take work - I have to remember to mark a new file as 'in progress' and possibly a 'commission', though that's become routine, and changing something from 'in progress' to 'complete' is a pleasure. But it's work well worth doing to create a nice little network of shortcuts and secret passages through the terrain of your thoughtfully-laid-out tree of folders.
Links are great as part of that too, they can provide shortcuts.
Real-world use: I am an artist, and I have found that the best way to organize my work is with a series of yearly directories. If I begin a large, multi-year project, it goes in a directory within the year I start it; I'll make a link to it that lives next to all the yearly directories.
I also use OSX's tags a ton. Files get marked as 'in progress', 'complete', 'paid for', 'commission', and 'experiment' (and a few other things). When I want to decide what to work on in any particular day it's super easy to open up the saved search for "everything in progress" that I keep on my desktop; this shows me everything in those yearly directories that's marked as 'in progress', whether it's personal work, client work, whether it's part of a large multi-file project with its own folder hierarchy or just a single file in the yearly directory. I also have a saved search for 'commission'+'in progress' for those days when I know I want to work on clearing the commission queue. And whenever I spend some time just fooling around with different effects to create interesting looks, I'll save my scribblings with the 'experiment' tag; when I decide to use it later I can easily tell Illustrator to open a file, and look through the 'experiment' tag to find the file full of some crazy procedural explorations, regardless of how long ago I did it. This habit has saved me hours of digging for that one file where I did that cool trick once.
Trying to organize all the files in my artwork directory with just tags would be a total fucking nightmare, the subdirectory for a multi-year graphic novel has its own folder hierarchy that's several levels deep, and when I know that what I want to work on today is "getting the prepress files together for book 3 of the graphic novel" it's definitely great to be able to just hit the top-level link to the graphic novel directory, then go into "books", then "3", and have its own little file hierarchy in there.
Tags by themselves are not very good for serious organization, but they can be very good for pulling things out of a hierarchical structure. They take work - I have to remember to mark a new file as 'in progress' and possibly a 'commission', though that's become routine, and changing something from 'in progress' to 'complete' is a pleasure. But it's work well worth doing to create a nice little network of shortcuts and secret passages through the terrain of your thoughtfully-laid-out tree of folders.