filetags VS TagSpaces

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.

https://github.com/tagspaces/tagspaces

Either way, will definitely be keeping an eye on your app, it seems ducking cool ;)

TagSpaces – Your versatile file organizer (version 50504): organize, tag and browse your files, photos and documents

Take a file. Add [awesome] to the name. There. You've tagged a file, and you can search for it with your desktop search / fzf / etc. Switch system, copy it anywhere, it works. You can do this by hand. Or, if you like clicks and drag-n-drop, use TagSpaces. Or, use tss.

The UNIX filesystem has traditionally been a graph for ever. I haven't looked at details for a couple of decades, but definitely all UNIX/POSIX/Linux filesystems operate on a graph model.

A distinction I used to make when I was teaching this stuff: on your filesystem tree, on Unix names (labels) are on the links (arrows), while on DOS/Windows names are on nodes (boxes).

If you want to explore a tag-based system, take a look at https://www.tagspaces.org/

The quickest workaround – and the most satisfactory one to boot – is to abandon Windows Media Player. Use a digital asset management app like TagSpaces.

TagSpaces: TagSpaces is a cross-platform tagging and organizing tool that can help you tag and manage your files and folders. It supports various file formats and can be used with local and cloud storage providers.

If the naming convention is different, or you'd prefer to go the tagging route, tagspaces may be your best bet. It can use standard tags in the file, or a sidecar file (file with the same name, but different extension next to the original file) to keep tags with the file.

Agreed. Why not use the filesystem as the database that it is? Modern filesystems support tags or extended attributes that could be used to implement tags. Failing that, just encode tags in the filename. Document management tools could then use the filesystem as the source of truth.