Regarding Tags to Help With Searching

[melhuss]

I work for a large department and we have a shared drive that we access using Windows Explorer. I'm trying to find a way to use tags to make finding documents easier for tracking down when we have patient stories (similar to the tags you can add natively within Windows Explorer for JPGS). Our goal would be that we can search for a patient name or a diagnosis and regardless of the folder it was in, if it was tagged, we could find it. Often, we have multiple stories within the same document so the document must be named generally but I'd like to be able to have 7-10 different tags to represent each of the patient stories within that document.

Some of our PDFs are designed in house (using InDesign) but some of them are done by outside graphic designers/mailhouses so I can't save tags on the creation end. Some PDFs we get have limited access so I also can't edit the PDF using Adobe Pro DC. All staff has Adobe Reader so I'd like to be able to find a solution that allows the greatest audience of staff to buy in.

How would I go about adding tags PDFs to allow for easier finding by all?

[a_C_student]

Have you tried using metadata keywords? File -> Properties -> Description tab

[maxwithdax]

Sounds like a meta data is your answer. Adobe Bridge might be the right tool here to set all the data since you can do it in large batches if you need. But, the simple solution provided above is probably the best place to start. You are basically asking for a searchable database. The description or keyword fields in the meta data seem like the logical first step.