TagSpaces is a free, non-locking, open source application for organizing and managing your local files with the help of tags.
Introduction
Here you will find an overview of the major functionalities offered by the TagSpaces Community Edition. For more details please check the TagSpaces documentation.
TagSpaces Community Edition is a desktop application, which offers the following functionalities.
File and folder tagging
Key functionality in TagSpaces is the ability to add tags to files and folders. In comparison to similar product, TagSpaces does not use a central database for storing the tags but rather offers to alternative ways for saving this meta information, which are described in the following sections.
File tagging based on filenames
TagSpaces supports tagging of files in a multi platform way. It uses basically the name of the file to save this kind of meta information. As an example if you want to add the tags vacation and alps to a image named IMG-2653.jpg, the application will simply rename it to IMG-2653[vacation alps].jpg. File renaming is of course very controversial solution, with its own limitations (on some operating systems the file path length is limited to ca. 256 characters). Once embedded in the name of file, the tag stick there and can be removed only by file renaming. This makes the tagging very “durable” and portable. The tags embedded in the name of a file “survives” synchronization across cloud platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive and can be read by TagSpaces or any other file searching software on Windows, Mac OS, Linux or Android.
File and Folder tagging with sidecar files
As alternative to saving the tags in the file names, TagSpaces offers saving this kind of data in a sidecar files located in a hidden .ts folder. This method is used for adding tags to folders and can be used for adding tags to files. The activation of this kind tagging for files, can be done in the settings of the application as shown in the following screenshot.
Note: Folders are always tagged with the help of sidecar file called .tsm, located in the .ts of every tagged folder.
Activating the persisting of tags for files in sidecar files
After the activation, the application will created for every tagged file an extra file having the same file name as the source file, but with a additional JSON extension. For example after tagging some files in some of your file locations you will have a similar file structure.
~ location (with your files)
├── subfolder1
│ ├── .ts
│ │ ├── tsm.json <-- contains tags and description for subfolder1
│ │ ├── file1.jpg.json
│ │ └── file2.pdf.json
│ ├── file1.jpg
│ └── file2.pdf
├── .ts
│ ├── file3.png.json
│ └── file4.docx.json
├── file3.png
└── file4.docx
The main advantage of this solution is that the name of the files is not changed after tagging and there is theoretically no limit in the number of tags you can add to a given file. If you move or rename tagged files in TagSpaces it will take care of the sidecar file, which will also renamed or moved in the appropriate folder. But if you move or rename this file in an external file manager, you have to move or rename the sidecar files by hand. The same hold true for the deleting a file from an external application. It will not automatically delete the sidecar file in the .ts folder. These drawbacks makes the tagging with sidecars less robust and future proof.
Note: If you want to have the files located in the .ts folder synched with some cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive you have to enable the synching of hidden folders and files.
File management operations
The app can be used as a simple file manager. It support currently the following operations on files and folders.
File creation in plain text, html and markdown formats
File renaming
File moving
File deleting
File opening with the current default application for the operating system
Opening the containing folder of a file in the default file manager for the operating system
Folder creation
Folder renaming
Folder deleting
Revealing the folders in the default file manager of the operating system
System Requirements
Windows
Multi-core 64 bit processor
Windows 10
2GB of RAM and 130MB of available hard-disk space
1280x800 display resolution
macOS
Multi-core 64 bit processor
Mac OSX v10.10 or higher
2GB of RAM and 130MB of available hard-disk space
1280x800 display resolution
Linux
Multi-core 64 bit processor
Linux 64 bit
2GB of RAM and 130MB of available hard-disk space
1280x800 display resolution
Android
Android 6 or later
1GB of RAM and 80MB of available space for the installation
640x960 pixels minimum resolution
Installation Instructions
You can find out how to install TagSpaces on various platform on the installation documentation page
https://www.tagspaces.org/downloads/
https://www.tagspaces.org/#
https://github.com/tagspaces/tagspaces
Topic: TagSpaces is an app for organizing and managing your local files with tags. (Read 490 times)