Collection based file organization

Collections oriented browsing and generation of folders:

I don\'t know if this has been done before, I use Gnome 2.14 and I haven\'t seen it, maybe Vista has it or OS X but I don\'t use any proprietary software (except at the cyber café) so any similarity with other apps it\'s just coincidence :).

I\'ve noticed that many Gnome apps that handle images, music, etc. have a \"collection\", I think this is a good approach but only if you had a homogeneous way to manage those files. I\'ll try to explain this, suppose Joe has all his photos in his F-Spot collection, and some ogg/mp3 files in his rhythmbox/banshee collection, he also has some Videos in (Don\'t know if there is any video player for Gnome that handles collections of videos) and mail, he wants to burn a CD/DVD with all that data together.
He\'s facing the following problems:
- He doesn\'t know where exactly each file is, he could spend hours searching his files as he has a HUGE /home and some of those files are imported in the collections from other places of the disk.
- He has to organize those files before burning, otherwise the data in the CD will be a mess.
- He needs to burn the CD/DVD now!

Now, to solve that problem we could add a view to Nautilus that simplifies the browsing of those collections (image) (ignore the window title, i just took a screenshot from a wallpaper folder :P) , then Joe will drop the files he wants into the icon view, press burn CD/DVD and Nautilus does all the magic for him, orders data in separate folders, ie. Mails in \"mail/date\" (the generation of folder names should support internationalization), Music in \"music/artist\" (could be possible to make this customizable in \"music/genre\" or \"music/format/artist\" where format is either mp3 or ogg, for example), and \"photos/tags\".
This should also be applicable to other ways of managing files such as saving data into a USB key, copying files through a LAN, organizing the files of your home folder, or anything else you can think :).

I know this idea could be hard to implement and I don\'t really like to make mockups, but i hope that some developers find this idea useful.


Excuse me for my poor english.