filetags VS guess-filename.py

For my personal tool-set, I've settled for "everything in the file name" because in my experience, this ensures that no meta-data gets lost when moving paths, on thumb drives with ancient file systems, OS-borders and so forth (https://github.com/novoid/filetags + other tools + https://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/ as an overview).

Technically, it makes use of filename-based time-stamps and tags by the "filetags"-method which also includes the rather unique TagTrees feature as one particular retrieval method.

What do you mean by filetags? This?

I don't know if this is perfect but for me, this method with its tools is working pretty great since a decade or so: Managing Digital Files (e.g., Photographs) in Files and Folders using filetags (all sorts of things related to tags), guess-filename (generates most file names for me), guess-target-folder and move2archive (moving files to their destination) + some more tools I wrote.

filetags and companions

filetags and its companion tools is a direct result of my PhD projects with tagstore. For the basic concept of filetags, I worked with file tagging methods for at least six years.

I've always thought that personal files, photos, or any other kind of just needed more connections between them to improve my information retrieval experience. That's how I had become a Zettelkasten evangelist. I believed it would be the cure for the information overload disease of our era.

But life made me use Emacs org-mode more and more, and I'm now in love with tags. Retrieving information has become so easy, especially with org-mode's tags inheritance, that I hardly think making connections between headings or notes is necessary anymore[1]. And I believe that applying tags to filenames (a la Karl Voit [2]) will create the same effect

[1] A Zettelkasten-like system is still unbeatable imo when it comes to ideas repositories, i.e. a second brain you can talk to and get new insights. It's just not that great for personal knowledge management or project management.

[2] https://github.com/novoid/filetags

Technically, it makes use of filename-based time-stamps and tags by the "filetags"-method which also includes the rather unique TagTrees feature as one particular retrieval method.

It sorts by file name and alphabet. My guess-filename and date2name generate date- and timestamps quite cleverly as long as your meta-data is not broken.

If your set of rules are somewhat more general, you may check out https://github.com/novoid/guess-filename.py and https://gist.github.com/novoid/c4a239abc4027ecfd14e9904da88e6a1 (using this shell script via WSL)

I've written https://github.com/novoid/guess-filename.py which you can take as a framework or template. Add your own renaming criteria and you're good to go. It uses the original file name for pattern matching and it can also scan the content of PDF files.

I don't know if this is perfect but for me, this method with its tools is working pretty great since a decade or so: Managing Digital Files (e.g., Photographs) in Files and Folders using filetags (all sorts of things related to tags), guess-filename (generates most file names for me), guess-target-folder and move2archive (moving files to their destination) + some more tools I wrote.

guess-filename (Python): derive file names according to file name matching rules and PDF file content