Looks nice, but for personal use I don't like the idea of a tool like this changing the file names, and then I see the option in the Pro version to use "sidecar files". Nice! It then brought up another question I have often had with projects like these that start out on Unix like systems and are then available for Windows as well: why do they use dot files on Windows and tell the user to hide them manually, instead of using files with a "hidden" attribute? Part of porting should be adhering to the local conventions, should it not? Since this is not the first time I stumble upon dot files in Windows Explorer I am left wondering there is a real reason for it?
On the one hand, I wouldn't want my filenames to be changed (and in addition, one would likely run into problems with the path length limit, at least on Windows).
On the other hand, using sidecar files would essentially mean giving up freedom to move/rename your files. Sure, you could move/rename the metadata files manually, but it'd be much more work, and you're bound to mess up sooner or later.
I'm not sure how to solve both those points without making the application "own" the files (as e.g. Camlistore does).
NTFS can have additional data streams associated with a file. It's used for stuff like the warnings you get when you try to run an executable downloaded from the Internet. This seems like a perfect solution for me, at least on Windows.
The problem with Alternate Data Streams is interoperability. In many cases, the data will silently be lost when copying between different file systems and/or operating systems. I believe Windows itself will warn you when trying to perform an operation that would discard alternate data streams (for example copying from NTFS to FAT), but many tools would likely silently strip it.
Think of things like any of the cloud drives, bittorrent, screen-sharing or IM software. Are they aware of ADS (or equivalent for that platform). What would the right thing to do be when syncing between platforms that have support, and ones that do not?
It's not just the correct way on windows, it's the correct way on macOS, and any other file system with resource forks or extensible file metadata.
However file metadata is usually pretty poorly understood by most developers (based on a personal sample of my past experiences) and file system resource forks are even less understood...
Perfect is the enemy of good and all that sort of thing ...
Windows even has a standard NTFS metadata field for Tags. You can display it as a column in File Explorer's detail view. You can edit it in the Properties > Details sheet.
Outside of Office sometimes trying to encourage using it to make searching easier and Windows sometimes using it for ID3 tags from audio files, I've never really seen anyone try to use it.
Even worse are Unix utilities that leave dotfiles in every single directory they touch. Just because they're hidden doesn't mean that they're not dirty! Pleas keep your crap restricted to ~/.config, which exists for this very reason.
If you place something in the ~/.config it is not portable, ones you copy your files and folders to a usb stick or sync them with dropbox, you loose the meta data.
Then the app is poorly designed. It should sync metadata over a different channel.
Otherwise you get inconsistent behavior such as metadata being synced when you copy entire folders, but not when you copy individual files. Then you have to rely on even more hacks to get around that, like detecting when a file is copied and automatically copying the corresponding dotfile. Sooner or later you end up with a complete mess.
Probably it's not a high-priority issue, so they didn't implement it yet. Should be easy enough to implement for someone, who uses Windows, if they accept patches. It's a common pattern, when developers think about their environment first.
Wow! I've been looking for something exactly like this for a long time. I am a motovlogger (which is someone who rides a motorcycle while vlogging) and I generate tons of small videos that I've always struggled to organize. I'll need to use random videos from months and months ago sometimes and it's so easy to lose track of them when you have thousands upon thousands of small short video clips.
One question/request I might have is if it is possible to attach a general note to a specific file. It's helpful to know what a video is about without having to watch the whole thing.
FWIW KDE does metadata for files, eg comments/tags/star rating, that you can see in the dolphin information panel and search using their standard toolset.
I love Camlistore but have been hesitant to use it. They're just doesn't seem to be enough tracking behind it.. if more people were into it, i would be really happy.
Instead of renaming the file, TagSpaces could create a symbolic link and preserve the original file name. All such links could be managed in a TagSpaces folder.
This would allow TagSpaces to have temporal knowledge as to when tags were added or removed.
If the links are cascaded as I have shown, then when the original file is moved, TagSpaces will only need to rebuild the first link. The rest will still work.
The issue of the tags causing the name to be too long can be addressed by a different tag naming strategy.
> ln -s ../fluffy.jpg "fluffy [+cat].jpg"
> ln -s "fluffy [+cat].jpg" "fluffy [+yarn].jpg"
> ln -s "fluffy [+yarn].jpg" "fluffy [-yarn].jpg"
This would require TagSpaces to have some simple logic to determine which tags were relevant at a particular point in time.
That system won't work for very many tags. Unix systems have limits on the number of symbolic links you can resolve when trying to access a file. I can't remember the limit on GNU/Linux off the top of my head but I'm fairly sure its something ridiculous like 32 links.
Thanks for pointing that out. Instead of the endless cascade, just cascade once off of the first link. That way, there would never be more than two references to resolve and you still get the temporal benefit.
This is great idea, but is very Linux/OSX specific, since TagSpaces is multiplatform application, this proposal will not work on Windows or Android platforms.
The screenshots look nice, but they only contain a couple dozen files and a similarly small number of tags.
I've got a good fraction of a million files on my home partition, and I'm likely to end up with hundreds if not thousands of tags if I were to go about organizing them. I'd like to know whether this tool will work on such a scale without inconvenience. Too many similar tools fall apart once you hit a hundred tags or so, not to mention a few hundred thousand entries. It's a lot of wasted effort to start using a tool like that, only to realize that it doesn't scale.
Usually it takes a large amount of dissatisfied, paying customers nagging you with bug fixes and feature requests to eventually build a quality pro product.
However, by the looks of it TagSpaces seems very polished and useful right off the bat.
You expect to type PRO and have people know what your talking about? I certainly don't, and unless you are talking about the wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28category_theory%29, which it doesn't sound like, I don't think it's reasonable.
That is what we do at http://www.cloudfindhq.com, picking up the renamed file issue from the underlying Cloudstores was quite a challenge to implement. A lot of subtleties to get right with not always helpful API endpoints.
Looks like the license is AGPL so that nobody can clone them and do a similar 'pro' version.
Now, when you contribute to their OS project you need to sign a CLA which pretty much consists of the usual 'all your base are belong to us'.
You hereby grant to the Owner and to recipients of software distributed by the Owner a perpetual, worldwide, non- exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
The contributors have to sign the CLAs only if they want to contribute to the core of the application. BTW, all the tagspaces extensions are licensed under MIT, so here no CLAa are required.
Funny how sometimes you think "You know 'x' would be really useful, I would use an application like 'x'." Then the next day its the top link on Hacker News.
Or worse: "You know 'x' would be really useful, maybe I should build that." Then you decide to let it rest for a few days (most of my projects have been bouncing around in my head for a while before I have a good idea of what product I want to make) and the next day it's on Hacker News.
Tagging is an old one for me. I settled on using tmsu but never actually got around to use it. The photo organizer sounds like something I should be doing, I start losing more and more photos. Problem is, Tagspaces either renames my files or leaves hidden directories in every directory (what is this, OS X?). Guess I might give tmsu another spin or, if that isn't satisfactory, write my own after all.
Yeh, come and check out Cloudfind - we have just launched a new product that integrates nicely into Dropbox and Google Drive - free to use for personal and small team use. Lets you organise the tags into logical groupings to help you organise your stuff.
I actually would not mind having a simple database (that is cross platform like SQLite) which would act as a separation layer from the files (and store any tags, and minimal meta data)...only because I'm not crazy about any system changing file names on me. Call me old fashioned ;-) That being said, the UI - especially the editor - looks pretty neat.
I've seen comments for git-annex, but the lack of a neat gui/browser gives me pause. Can anyone recommend an alternative to Tagspaces but which does not alter filenames...and is of course cross platform (because i work with a couple different machines every day), and is open source?
Tagging the filesystem and making a personal-cloud manager is very similar to one of the directions I'm headed in with meta64.com, which is built on the Java JCR, Lucene, Solr Cloud, Polymer, and is a sort of tree-structured repository that does lots of these types of shenanigans.
I have to say that it would be nice if the sidecar functionality was available in the free edition. I don't want to try the free version because I'm unsure of the effects that renaming will have. I'd be afraid of losing potential customers because they didn't know about the renaming. I will still buy the Pro version because I definitely need somethings like this and this looks like a nice project to support.
p.s. is it possible to upgrade to Pro Unlimited if I like the Pro version?
Most people aren't very diligent with naming their tags and organizing their data. I am definitely guilty of this.
Are there any data management services out there that can use some kind of semantic understanding to let you search through your own data? In essence, "google" my own personal collection of data? For example, I might make quick notes throughout the day and tag them with vague or maybe even incorrectly spelled tags. Can I type something like "note I wrote yesterday about dogs" and get correct results?
I've been using TagSpaces for a while (mostly ass desktop note taking app). Nice project, but went back to Tomboy for two main UX reasons:
* no ctrl+n for new file
* no auto-saving of the file itself (I have to say last version I've been using was 2.1.1. I've downloaded / updated the software on my computer and will check this soon (apparently is missing)
I have been looking for something similar to this that would allow me to also share the files with other people using a group permission structure per file. Has anyone seen something like that?
Other operating systems don't posses the easiness of the tagging system build in OS X. The issue we see in the OS X tags is that they are locked to a particular operating system. Ones you copy/move your files on some other other platforms or the cloud you are mostly loosing the tagging information. BTW, TagSpaces is not only for tagging, we use it for example as a Evernote alternative.
> for someone using only macOS/Mac OS X, how is this an improvement over the built-in file tagging?
The answer is "it doesn't"?
I'm not saying it doesn't have a market, I'm trying to understand if it offers anything above the OS included functionality for someone purely in the Apple ecosystem.
The title I got in my RSS reader was "File manager supports over 100 file extensions(Open source)." I was expecting a recent discovery of something from like the 60's being the earliest known document using the term "Open source." Shining example of the over-overloading of terms in tech.
In order to organize files with tagspaces you could use tags, but is not mandatory. You can still relay your local file and folder structure, which is displayed in the application. In a way you can use any conventions with TagSpaces, without a bounding to any file sync cloud service or Evernote.
I've been wanting to build something like this for about a decade but never bothered, and this looks so much better than anything I could have built. Thanks Ilian!
Hah, it's sitting there waiting for several fonts to load from fonts.googleapis.com, but I have my browser set to ignore any font choices set by webpages. Apparently it's just going to leave the dom empty forever.
I checked that last night, actually. A traceroute showed packets winding their way through comcast's network, hitting google's, and then vanishing. Whatever the problem was, it's been fixed. The moral of the story is to never rely on third-party assets, especially for synchronous stylesheets that block the browser from even parsing the rest of the page.
