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Comment by pbmonster | Hacker News Reader

> Tagging/labelling with attributes is the only viable solution that I've found.

What's your solution for a new tag being introduced late, which could/should be retroactively applied to already tagged media?

Re-tag the entire inventory by hand? Re-tag automatically with some ML/AI tool after you've tagged enough media to train a discriminator? Or just live with old inventory not having that tag?

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It can mean a lot of effort, yes, but in a lot of cases you can drastically reduce the number of items to re-tag by defining some simple relations between tags. For example tag A may require tag B to exist but not C, etc.

In the end maintaining order always requires effort, if you have a hierarchical folder structure and you decide to add another category you have the same problem. And realistically folders are "good enough" for most situations, you can choose for each file how fine-grained the categorization should be and the mental overhead for finding a file is often not that bad.

In the case of TMSU, you have a shell / command-line tool, so that anything which generates a listing of files can be fed in to assign additional tags.

That might be based on find, grep, other pattern-matching tools, tmsu itself, or manually curating a file or files of content you want to modify.

One of the reasons I strongly prefer CLI tools in general is that they make precisely this sort of bulk action so viable. I've modified anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of items with a small set of commands, and in most cases many millions or more should be reasonably doable.

Depends very much on the problem domain. It's really easy to do this on macOS.

So for example I have a top level `Documents/docs` directory. In this everything is recorded in format `yyyy-mm-dd Title.ext` format. I have a saved search which says "give me everything untagged". I will select each thing that is untagged and then tag it!

I think they're asking something different, what if you think of a brand new tag after you have already tagged things for years? It is potentially a lot of effort to retroactively apply it.

Yeah. All systems like this have to account for ad-hoc additions. Otherwise you will often jam a few squares into some circles just to accommodate your categorization system.

AI/LLMs can probably make it easy.

I ran into a similar situation a while back now,

I have my version of a zettelkasten system, where I put a tag/ list of tags at the top of the note file (timestamp being the note name). Combining this with something like ripgrep allows me to search the note file contents by those tags, and keywords.

A tag I used, didn't seem like the right one for the content as it matured and grew over time.

This meant creating a tiny script which would take the name of the tag and the note name, in which it is being used and look at backlinks and forward links and rename the tag based on usage.

Yes, usually, you must recheck your content regularly and check if old content validates for new tags, or if old tags have shifted in meaning, splitted into new subtags, etc. But this does not necessarily mean you should check everything, and regularly must not mean every week or month. Just review small parts of your library for changes, occasionally as you have time, the improvements will come over time by themselves.

A never changing library, is a dead library.

With hierarchical tags this is less of an issue. Presumably the old tags are still valid for the extant documents? Can the new tag be asub-tag of one of the extant tags?

More likely to discover a supertag than a subtag in my experience. I think this is why so many people get value out of zettelkasten: focuses on connections rather than categories.

Ideally both the supertag and subtag would return the document tagged with the subtag.

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