File/folder behaviour

EagleFiler
1

Hello everyone,

After lots of fiddling about with competitor products, I’m about sold on EagleFiler now. I wonder if I might get some clarifications on folder behaviour which is puzzling me a bit.

What I’d like to do is to create a smart folder for pdfs of a particular kind, and then to be able to edit that folder to get rid of files that appear in the search that aren’t relevant to what I’m doing. As far as I can see, if I create a smart folder then delete items from it, they are deleted from the records database as well. Equally, if I create a smart folder, then copy all the items across to a sub-folder in my records database, and then delete an item, then it also gets deleted from my records database.

Is there a way to be able to achieve this? I’m a bit puzzled because items in my records sub-folder (the one copied across from the smart folder) appear in both the sub-folder and the records folder itself, but delete simulataneously when I delete them in the sub-folder.

Any help gratefully received…thanks.

Ian

2

Folders and smart folders work like in the Finder. So you cannot tweak the contents of a smart folder (except by adjusting its criteria) without affecting the contents of the library. There is no copying going on—dragging files moves them. And deleting a file from a folder, well, deletes it.

It might help to think of Records as a special smart folder that shows everything in the library. Thus, each file appears in Records and in a folder, and deleting the file deletes it from both.

I think for the task at hand you want to use a tag. First, create the tag, then drag the files from the smart folder onto the tag. The tag can be used like a playlist in iTunes. It shows the list of files that you added, but deleting a file from the tag doesn’t delete it from the library; it just untags it, removing it from the list.

3

Brilliant - thanks very much. That works really well.

Best,

Ian