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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

Very nice, but a stopper for me is that if you have a pdf with the name "foobar.pdf" on your disk and tag it with TagSpaces with the tags Sciences, Thermodynamics you end up with a file "foobar[Sciences Thermodynamics].pdf". The tags are directly encoded into the file names.

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Better approach:

* Metadata: read/write tags as file metadata (depending on the file format) most common formats like document, image, audio, video have metadata support. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

* Sidecar file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform and the Apple Spoghtlight files http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6707/how-to-stop-os...

* Alternative file streams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

(first option is preferred)

Yeah, me too. I don't quite get the appeal of the tags living in the file name. Yes, it means that there isn't any need to maintain a database, but it also means that a) things become very unpleasant if I want to use anything but TagSpaces to browse my files, b) if I want to use anything to rename my files (especially automatically, i.e. a script) I have to take extra care not to muck up the tags, and c)if I want to share files with other people or organize files that I don't strictly own, then everyone else has to deal with me trashing their file names for my own convenience.

So, yeah, show stopper. Also, what's so bad about a database? Yes, the file system is very good at keeping track of files, but there are databases that largely don't get in the way, like sqlite, cdb, etc. They will sync across servers reasonably well with things like dropbox, as long as you don't have lots of people trying to concurrently do stuff from multiple places. If that's what you're doing, this kind of tool isn't right for the job anyhow.

This is a stopper. I don't want to pollute the filenames with this information. Using a sqlite db or something even simpler would have been more preferable imho

Hm, sqlite3 would be slow for large collections of small individual files.

However their approach is awful. Imagine what will happen if you tag video/audio files.

Saving the tags in the file name has many advantages. First of all your tags are not vendor locked. You can use the search capabilities of your operating system to search for the tagged files. And last but not least, just by simple synching your files with for example dropbox oder owncloud you are getting your tagged data on all your devices... You don't care about complex db sync mechanisms...

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