Imagine you have just added a small image directory to your file pool and started Stratus.
This is your Stratus mount point, or base directory, which shows all of the files in your file pool. Everything is either a symbolic link or a directory here. Hovering over a file with the mouse shows a preview of it, just like you would expect. Let's start organizing some things!
To create a new tag, just make a new directory. To associate a file with that tag, ctrl-drag (copy) it into the directory.
We enter the new directory that we just copied supcat2.jpg into. Another way to say this is that we 'select' the tag cat, and here are our results.
Notice that ':cat' has been appended to the filename; every file in our virtual directory has a complete colon-separated list of tags that it's associated with appended to it.
Let's create a second tag the same way as before, and drag the file into the new subdirectory.
Now we've selected two tags, 'cat' and 'image macro'. We could have a hundred 'cat' pictures and a thousand 'image macro' pictures, but only ones with both tags will be shown in this directory.
Note that the order of the tags you select doesn't matter. Here instead of "cat/image macro" we select "image macro/cat" and get the same results.
If we were to delete the file from this directory, it would remove the cat tag from the file, leaving it tagged as an image macro only. Also, if we were to shift-drag (move) this image into a new 'cute' directory, it would remove the tag cat from it and add the tag cute.
After applying a few more tags to a few more files, we find we can 'drill down' to where we want. Here, we've selected wallpaper, but we could further select france or sunset to be more specific. There is no cat subdirectory here because nothing matches wallpaper/cat. Yet.
There is another way we can apply tags to files: directly renaming them. Here we're adding the tag 'rosa kato' to a file, but there is no rosa kato directory.
Now there is. Adding the tag created it for us automatically.
I hope this brief demonstration helps get you started with Stratus!