TMSU is a tool for tagging your files
tmsu.org
tmsu.org
Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this might be useful.
I'd be interested in hearing from people who have found a use for TMSU.
edit: too bad it isn't on ubuntu repositories. I've a personal policy to avoid programs outside the repositories
Select more than one book, right click -> Edit metadata -> Edit metadata in bulk
You can then customize search engine like recoll to display ebook metadata as contextual snippets in full-text search results. Best of both worlds.
Something like this might help, if I make each bookmark in to a separate file.
In these cases I use the tags feature to augment the metadata so that I am pretty confident I will be able to find it quickly in future, even if I can't remember exactly what it was or why it was originally saved.
It follows a fairly loose mental structure: Broad Category - [Sub-category -] [Series Title -] Name/Media Title (Creator, Source, Short Description/Tags)
Which usually looks something like:
* Keyboards - Keycaps - Warmaster (martinyeah, geekhack.org) - 2.jpg
* Paintings - Market In Cairo (Leopold Carl Müller, Middle Eastern desert).jpg
* Themes - Android - Themer (mycolorscreen.com) - Wrong Way (Victor Burgoa).png
* Trailers - Godzilla (2013) - Comic-Con Teaser.mp4
* Typefaces - Lettering - Gospel Waffle Sunday syrup logo time-lapse (Lauri Johnston).mp4
The basic idea has been to organize the filenames by broad to narrower info from left-to-right, which helps with quick filtering/searching and allows many categories of files to be kept in large single directories while being readable. By adding the creator and site where needed it also allows me to trace the source. Not a perfect naming system but it only takes a little longer to save while adding considerable value long-term.
It's a small step from there to a companion tool that crawls your filesystem for URLs, and attempts to classify them based on a keyword analysis of the origin.
Generally speaking, I can't help but feel we're not quite there yet when it comes to meta-data and flexible file system views. We're still coming up with all sorts of cataloguing systems for different types of binary files – I just implemented a Vorbis comment (music tag) parser the other day, and that's just one out of many formats.
Extended attributes (attr(5), "user_xattr") are enabled by default these days on most Linux file systems, but are limited in space and I don't see a lot of tool implementations around the functionality.
Sure there are some general blunt force search indexers, but overall I feel we still live in a Wild West meta-data age as opposed to the myriad of well standardised open data formats.
It would be nice to be able to use a (music, movie, picture, porn, whatever) site's existing meta-data when downloading a file, or hide all work-related files from the file system when you're at home.
Reminder: some programs will reset these xattributes upon the file being edited. Back when I was looking for a tagging program for the Mac I read Photoshop was one of those programs.
I would not trust putting in the effort to tag a bunch of files in a format so out of my control.
Not sure if this helps figure out a way around it.
I can see using TMSU for this with following approach:
1. Mount the VFS, to e.g. mount point "mp"
2. Using Nemo Actions (I use Linux Mint), call a script that upon executing on the selected file will do the following:
- toggles the "sync" tag (so all files with "sync" will show-up under "mp/tags/sync")
- If the file already has a "sync" tag, untag it (can it be done by doing an rm on "mp/tags/sync/<filename>"?)
- Based on tag being present or not, toggle file icon to visually indicate if the file is marked/unmarked. I don't know how this can be done.
3. Once done, we can run a simple rsync script that syncs "mp/tags/sync/*" to the sdcard on the phone.
Not sure when I will get around to actually implenting this :)
In a business setting, I often see people's desktops cluttered with files. It'd be nice to give them a virtual folder on the desktop where they can drag and drop files into in to it, with tags.
http://lunarfrog.com/taggedfrog/
That said, I would like to be able to tag and recall from the command line in order to integrate tags with other tools. Windows already offers a limited tagging service for Office documents.
https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/blob/master/src/tmsu/cli/repa...
They stick better with files, as long as your tools know about them and handle them fine. Weakness is that they can (will) get lost in tools that do not. There are many of them: zip-unzip, tar-untar, http requests, ftp, etc.
Including, frustratingly, Linux's NFS implementation. A WONTFIX apparently.
[1] https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/blob/master/src/tmsu/common/f...
In an even more ideal world I should be able to search for "all pictures of my daughter from last Christmas, unless they are out of focus".
For example, GMail and Outlook do this for mail items -- you don't need to know the subject, which is comparable to the file name, to retrieve an email -- and Google Desktop Search (discontinued) or Copernic does this for file systems. It is almost as if every system-retrievable item inside a file (e.g. every word in a text document) automatically becomes a searchable item of the file.
In a way, placing things in folders is some kind of (hierarchical) tagging, in which those 'tags' (folder and file names) form a traversable path to the entity. Adding tags to entities adds another retrieval path to the objects.
And – admitting I might not be a stereotypical computer user as my files have a high level of organisation – isn't searching the high-level kludge that fails relatively often, especially with hard to parse binary information?
I couldn't imagine relying more on meta-search than knowledge of where my files are located. A tag tool might be nice though, as it enables you to create an alternative hierarchy more suitable to a specific activity without completely abstracting away the physical layout.
Files tend to be better at describing themselves. To take an example from the TMSU docs, why would I ever need to tag an .mp3 file as music? If it's an MP3, and it's under my music directory, it's pretty clear what it is.
Putting files in a directory is semantically equivalent to applying a tag. But directory structure is no way fundamental to computing, and indeed tagging is more general and flexible solution to organizing files.
Yes, equivalent to a single tag. Not multiple tags.
We actually automatically tag files in Dropbox and Google Drive, so there's no need to move files
disclaimer: I work here!
Take TMSU's example command:
tmsu tag summer.mp3 music big-jazz mp3
We could come up with the same behavior WITHOUT an additional program:
mkdir ~/music/big-jazz/mp3/
ln -s ~/Downloads/summer.mp3 ~/music/big-jazz/mp3/summer.mp3
Could easily make this into a shell script.
Just my 2 cents.
alice.jpg goes into alice/, and bob.jpg goes into bob/, but where do you put groupshot.jpg?
Or a separate category?
Any grouping system would let you do both.