Fenced Folders!
This is just what I was searching for. I would love to have Fences capability in specific folders, even if it can't be just any random folder. The documents folder, my Download folder, and certain other folders I have are used many, many times a day.
Basically, the usage is a desire to have a path to a large number of files be simple and consistent, but still have a visually organized system. Simple, static fences would be a great start, but I could also see a 'Fence Heirarchy' that is like faux folders organized under the Fences paradigm that would permit the clean organization of a massive number of files in a single Windows folder location. Or if not a hierarchy, then a tag system, possibly. If you can have a series of alternate fence layouts, such as categories of human expression for photos of faces (art reference folder), then a given layout of fences would show the photos organized by tags that match the fence names. (In this case, 'Laughing', 'Grinning', 'Scowling', etc. Then those same photos could be organized as 'Human Face art reference' in a fence layout organized by ethnicity of the face, for example. And thus I would just throw a face photo into this folder, give it some tags like, 'Hispanic', 'Laughing', 'Hook-nose', 'Female', etc. And then various fence layouts would show the photo in the correct area.
And then, I'd also want to be able to see small/medium/large icons that show the actual pic, just like folders do now.
Of course, my wife needs this same system for our family photos.
One folder I use a lot is digital art references and photo-stock. Gigabytes of images. It sucks to use folder hierarchies to organize these because inevitably, I subdivide the contents of a folder once it gets too full, and that changes the path to the file, and also makes finding it in the future harder than it should be due to drilling down through multiple folder branches. Plus part of the organizing paradigm is the name, since the only way to organize is the file name and the folder name. But then that means even the file name might need to be changed. With a fences system as described above, I don't have to mess with changing names ever. They can be whatever.
Also, it would be great to have 'secure' or 'privacy' fences. Then you could have some shortcuts on the Desktop, or files in a fenced-folder that would not be visible or accessible to a user or to a program until a security login was performed. (Including to programs via the Open Recent... interface.)
