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Comment by masterzora | Hacker News Reader

This is actually something I've been wanting for a long, long time. Obviously I'm not planning on using this for / or anything system-related, but for my media archives &c it's perfect. Taking movies for example, I've found most people I know think an alphabetical approach is the way to go. This is useless, however, if I don't know what I want to watch. With the tags I can easily take tag in genres, directors, actors, etc and have my filesystem help me choose a film.

There is on major thing that I've considered would be an awesome addition to a system like this: automatic tagging from the metadata. It'd be awesome if my movies automatically got tagged by, say, resolution and length, so I wouldn't have to bother with such things.

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Same here, I want something similar to manage my photo collection. The current implementation actually can have plugins that act on specific file types, so automatic tags are just a few lines of code away.

But then what advantage would this system have over a dedicated media manager or the several semantic desktop projects? The only advantage I see is allowing traditional tools (unix utilities, conventional file managers, even 'open file' popups) to take advantage of the system without any extra effort on their side. Though wouldn't dedicated tools, say a full blown semantic desktop, allow for much better integration and usability?

That really depends on the use case, I guess. For me, the use case is that I've got a media server in my living room and, in addition to being hooked up to my TV, it also has a Samba share set up so that anyone in my apartment can watch/listen/look at/read/view anything anywhere in the apartment. In this case, it certainly would be possible to have every computer set up with a semantic desktop setup, but I'm still trying to keep my Eee minimal and visitors wouldn't necessarily be set up with the semantic desktop tools.

Maybe this implies ground for a semantic server, but I'm inclined to think that Samba (or your favourite mostly-transparent sharing protocol) on top of a tag-based system is actually a good and way to accomplish this particular use case.

> The only advantage I see is allowing traditional tools (unix utilities, conventional file managers, even 'open file' popups) to take advantage of the system without any extra effort on their side.

That's a pretty big advantage.

Tagsistant already supports automatic tagging from the metadata such as you have described. The linked article says it supports plugins that can “extract tags from file contents” in the second-to-last paragraph. So if you want to tag your movies the way you said, you just have to write a plugin that uses some library to extract that data, or wait for someone else to release a plugin like that.

Yeah, I didn't notice that on first read, but that definitely helps seal the deal for me. I'll probably set it up on my server tonight and at least look into hacking together that plugin.

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