

Proposal for a database-less, general purpose, name-based file management app - fiatjaf
https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629

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fiatjaf
For a long time I've been naming pictures with some combination of

    
    
      - the names of all people appearing on it,
      - the date,
      - the place where the picture was took and
      - what were everybody doing
    

Something like: "me, bob and anna running to get a bus on the christmas eve
2005.jpg"

~~~
j_s
Start the filename with a sortable date (and maybe time), eg.
20150220-whatever.jpg

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PaulHoule
This is interesting.

One of my current pain points with metadata is that I have hundreds of PDF
files on my android tablet that I read at the gym. If they are e-books I got
from Oreilly, the titles are obvious, but I have lots of documents where the
titles are some meaningless number.

An obvious answer is to extract metadata from the files and rename them,
although unfortunately only the files from Oreilly have consistently good
embedded metadata. I have my own needs for a "bloated" system with a database,
but that is not mutually exclusive with filename discipline.

~~~
fiatjaf
You don't even try to rename them manually?

In fact, a very nice way of starting this would be a command-line tool that
renamed files according to file metadata and some heuristics with the file
inner content.

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walterbell
With deep directory trees, long names can reach the limit for operating system
paths. Calibre stores a Dublin Core metadata file (plaintext) in the same
directory as the target file.

We need a public metadata registry that includes file hashes and license
status, along with a hash of the license file.

This will decentralize the manual effort of naming and tagging PDF, epub,
video, etc. It will also make it easier to identify files to which malware has
been added.

~~~
fiatjaf
The public metadata registry seems insanely good. Hasn't it been tried? What
else do know about the subject? Please share.

~~~
walterbell
Haven't seen a general file registry. There are "open metadata" efforts for
music and books:

[https://musicbrainz.org](https://musicbrainz.org) &
[http://alternativeto.net/software/mp3tag/](http://alternativeto.net/software/mp3tag/)

[http://openlibrary.org](http://openlibrary.org) &
[http://alternativeto.net/software/metax/](http://alternativeto.net/software/metax/)

