TagSpaces: Organize Your Files with Tags | Hacker News Reader

TagSpaces: Organize Your Files with Tags

tagspaces.org

31 pointsnoworriesnate15 comments

This headline excited me but then I read their website. It's an electron-like file manager that tries to do too many things instead of focusing on the core feature of tagging.

I had a product plan once upon a time that included a filesystem driver to let you browse using tags eg. c:\tags\my project. That would make it work in all your existing software and file dialogs.

The hierarchical nature of traditional filesystems is great when you want to "visit" everything (eg. browse through a folder to clean it up, enumerate to backup, calculate sizes, etc). But it's a constraint when you need to categorize a file in more than one place (eg. receipts / project X / resin purchases / March credit card expenses).

Windows has a tagging feature but nobody really uses it - it's exposed in Explorer, but not the Save dialog of most apps (another thing the envisioned product was supposed to fix).

> The hierarchical nature of traditional filesystems is great when you want to "visit" everything

Not really more than tags. Tags are superior to hierarchy of folders when a content can belongs to several folders. If you have very different folders, like 'Finance' and 'My pictures' then folders are going to be better. The issue with tags, is that if they are not restricted to a folder, you will have hundreds of them and you will have a hard time managing them.

The best trade off I have found is to create a hierarchy of fat folders (a few very distinct big folders) and a different tags taxonomy inside each one of them. If you want to tags content of different folders you need a new tag taxonomy only for cross tagging content.

To sum up:

- Hierarchical folders

- Each folder has its own tag list

- A Meta tags list to tag cross-folders content (which I prefer to call "collections")

> Not really more than tags

All I meant is there are use cases where you only want each item to show up once (eg. show me a list of all my files).

In my product, a file with multiple tags would show up in multiple folders - which is great until you hit one of the above use cases.

One way to accommodate is to just classify according to the "primary" tag in such circumstances (provided its clear the eg. first tag has some added weight).

One issue with tagging is it's a surprisingly personal and complicated topic IMO, at least enough so that generic apps can be complicated/costly to make for that purpose.

For instance I tag by date people, and purpose (e.g. 2021 tax declaration), and I want the date to always come first, but the rest should have a stable order, I want most of the tags in the file name, and ideally some meta groups handled outside (e.g. "official papers")

I'm not holding my breath for an app that does that, and paradoxaly it's also simple enough for me to build a home made partial solution. Picky customers that also will try to solve their own problems and only see value for the difference with their solution feels like a hell for any service company.

I used TagSpaces a bit, it does what it claims and is a decent enough application.

The electron part is less disturbing when you realize it's mostly a GUI, and there is almost nothing it wants to do without your active participation (the reason why I gave up on it). It helps you organize tags in file, but you should be ready to code something yourself if you expected to watch folders and match patterns and auto tag.

Same for sync, it won't have much to do with it, though it seems S3 support has been added.

In the end I didn't see anything I really wanted from it, as finding files by tag is already one click/command away, tagging files isn't crazy complicated either (and when it was, I ended up going back to 'find' anyway), and I had to use cron scripts anyway to deal with sync and new files.

Tagspaces is nice, but I don't know if anyone caring enough about file org to install a dedicated app also will be satisfied with the feature set.

I find it somewhat insane it renames files to add tags to them by default. Though there is a "sidecar" option which stores the tags in a hidden folder at least.

Still, pales in comparison to a full-featured document management app like DevonThink which is the sort of environment where I think tagging stuff can come in handy.

Tags are obviously very helpful in organizing files across folders hierarchy. But the effort needed is not insignificant. So any solution for the problem requires at least two features: easiest as possible for tagging new files (least mouse clicks + key presses) and automatic tagging. The first part requires a superb designed UI with lots of customization options. The second part can be built using plugins, regexs rules and content classification. I can envision even an open market for the second part.

IMO, the biggest question is however, whether a big enough demand for these kind of file management exists.

I want to like tags for personal use, but they always seem to fail at scale. The best experience I’ve had with tags was the old Flickr, where most of the work of tagging was done by other people.

I now find that, in practice, the problem of “file that logically belongs in more than one folder” occurs rarely enough that I can solve it by creating a README.txt file in the secondary location containing a note pointing to where the primary location is.

I wonder if they would share the internal debate where they chose to put the tags in separate files rather than using the tagging built into various filesystems.

I'm aware it's not a slam dunk decision either way, but the details would be interesting.

If you weren't aware, Windows >= 10, most Linux filesystems, and MacOS all support tagging files. With various caveats, ui, and portability issues.

Tagging for Windows seems to be more complete. It is fully integrated into the windows explorer.

https://tagging.connectpaste.com/home

I do wonder if NTFS will ever get file tagging. Stuff like this serves to fill a stopgap that honestly shouldn't exist, especially now that many major Linux filesystems have had this functionality baked-in.

It depends on what you mean by file tagging. NTFS has supported alternate data streams since forever ago, but as far as I know there is no standard key:value format for tags that is recognized by a wide number of applications.

"I do wonder if NTFS will ever get file tagging." That's just a plain lie. You can use tags in Windows and NTFS. Have you looked for the feature?

https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/add-tags-to-files...

Whoa, I never knew that! Explorer really ought to have a more overt tagging option, it probably would have kept me on Windows for a couple more weeks.

Not bad. But I can imagine that it will be more powerful to make a better file explorer (icon / thumbnail view) & tagging extension to VSCode

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