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My new digital life with tags   [Help!]

By: Laurent Duchastel     Montréal, Québec  
Date: Apr 05,2016 at 15:07
In Response to: www.tagspaces.org (Slobodan Vujnovic)

> https://www.tagspaces.org/

Interesting!

> no
> matter
> how well designed, a structure based on uniquely on folders and clever
> file naming
> just does not work any more.

I agree.

For years, I've been using ZTree filtering capabilities to "tag" my documents with such name as:

[Book] Vujonvic, S. - The power of tagging (2016) (ISBN: 992004215) {Computer}{ZTree}{Productivity}.pdf

It allows me to manipulate files with some efficiency.

While it works, this homemade-system is limited and takes time to put in place since I have hundreds of thousands digital books, videos, pictures and music.

Recently, it became a problem with cloud providers which are often restrictive on filename length and allowed characters.

Recently, I changed radically the way I organized some of my stuff with dedicated software:

Calibre - for ebooks - https://calibre-ebook.com/
Plex - for videos - https://plex.tv/
MusicBee - for music - http://getmusicbee.com/
Windows Live Photo Gallery - for pictures - http://windows.microsoft.com/fr-ca/windows-live/photo-gallery
Feedly.com - for saved articles and favorites URL - https://feedly.com/i/welcome

All of them use tags, some inherent to the files (XMP for pictures and ID3 for mp3), some in an external maner (OPF for books, database+whole subdir for each media with Plex, dedicated (and still limited) proprietary online system with Feedly).

The first three in that list above can improve significantly the quality of tagging by retrieving additionnal data from external database. This is especially appreciated with Calibre and Plex.

Calibre was the most welcomed revolution in my digital life. As an academic, I have thousands and thousands ebooks and documents on my computer. I've been using Calibre for years for ebook conversion, but this fall I took three whole days to learn its power and customization capabilities. I was conquered. I am gradually putting my whole library into it.

The hardest thing for me with Calibre and Plex is to let them organize MY files with THEIR own logic. Calibre saves ebooks with its own naming convention and folder hierarchy. ZTree can't be used safely here. Plex is very restrictive in the way you can organize and name files and folders. I have to ZTree-deprogram myself!

Yet this whole new paradigm is worth it.


Laurent Duchastel

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