filetags

… filetags example demonstrating: controlled vocabulary file ~/.filetags, tagging multiple files at once, removing tags by prepending a minus character, tagging using the proposed number shortcuts, tab completion of tags via Tab, and mutually exclusive tags (switching from draft to final without removing draft).

This Python script adds or removes tags to file names in the following form:

file without time stamp in name -- tag2.txt
file name with several tags -- tag1 tag2.jpeg
another example file name with multiple example tags -- fun videos kids.mpeg
2013-05-09 a file name with ISO date stamp in name -- tag1.jpg
2013-05-09T16.17 file name with time stamp -- tag3.csv

The script accepts an arbitrary number of files (see your shell for possible length limitations).

Target group: users who are able to use command line tools and who are using tags in file names.
Hosted on github: https://github.com/novoid/filetags

Why

Besides the fact that I am using ISO dates and times in file names (as shown in examples above), I am using tags with file names. To separate tags from the file name, I am using the separator “space dash dash space”.

For people familiar with Regular Expressions:

(<ISO date/time stamp>)? <descriptive file name> -- <list of tags separated by spaces>.<file extension>

Tagging files this way requires a file renaming process. Adding (or removing) tag(s) to a set of file results in multiple renaming processes. Despite advanced renaming tools like vidir (from moreutils) it’s handy to have a tool that makes adding and removing tags as simple as possible.

You may like to add this tool to your image or file manager of choice. I added mine to geeqie which is my favorite image viewer on GNU/Linux.

Installation

This tool needs Python 3 to be installed.

You can install filetags either via pip which is the recommended way. Or you can install filetags using the source code, e.g., by cloning the GitHub repository of filetags.

Installation Via Pip

If you have installed Python 2 and Python 3 in parallel, make sure to use the correct pip version. You might need to use pip3 instead of pip. If you only have Python 3 installed, you don’t have to care ;-)

On Microsoft Windows (only), you are going to need pip install pypiwin32 as prerequisite.

Now install filetags via pip: pip install filetags

You get updates by executing the very same pip command again.

Installation Via Source Code

If you use the GitHub sources (and not pip), the executable is filetags/__init__.py. You might want to create a symbolic link named “filetags” to that file.

Usage

./filetags/__init__.py --help

usage: ./filetags/__init__.py [-h] [-t "STRING WITH TAGS"] [--remove] [-i]
                              [-R] [-s] [-f]
                              [--filebrowser PATH_TO_FILEBROWSER] [--tagtrees]
                              [--tagtrees-handle-no-tag "treeroot" | "ignore" | "FOLDERNAME"]
                              [--tagtrees-link-missing-mutual-tagged-items]
                              [--tagtrees-dir <existing_directory>]
                              [--tagtrees-depth TAGTREES_DEPTH] [--ln] [--la]
                              [--lu] [--tag-gardening] [-v] [-q] [--version]
                              [FILE [FILE ...]]

This tool adds or removes simple tags to/from file names.

Tags within file names are placed between the actual file name and
the file extension, separated with " -- ". Multiple tags are
separated with " ":
  Update for the Boss -- projectA presentation.pptx
  2013-05-16T15.31.42 Error message -- screenshot projectB.png

This easy to use tag system has a drawback: for tagging a larger
set of files with the same tag, you have to rename each file
separately. With this tool, this only requires one step.

Example usages:
  ./filetags/__init__.py --tags="presentation projectA" *.pptx
      … adds the tags "presentation" and "projectA" to all PPTX-files
  ./filetags/__init__.py --tags="presentation -projectA" *.pptx
      … adds the tag "presentation" to and removes tag "projectA" from all PPTX-files
  ./filetags/__init__.py -i *
      … ask for tag(s) and add them to all files in current folder
  ./filetags/__init__.py -r draft *report*
      … removes the tag "draft" from all files containing the word "report"

This tools is looking for the optional first text file named ".filetags" in
current and parent directories. Each of its lines is interpreted as a tag
for tag completion. Multiple tags per line are considered mutual exclusive.

Verbose description: http://Karl-Voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/

positional arguments:
  FILE                  One or more files to tag

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t "STRING WITH TAGS", --tags "STRING WITH TAGS"
                        one or more tags (in quotes, separated by spaces) to
                        add/remove
  --remove              remove tags from (instead of adding to) file name(s)
  -i, --interactive     interactive mode: ask for (a)dding or (r)emoving and
                        name of tag(s)
  -R, --recursive       recursively go through the current directory and all
                        of its subdirectories. Implemented for --tag-gardening
                        and --tagtrees
  -s, --dryrun          enable dryrun mode: just simulate what would happen,
                        do not modify files
  -f, --filter          ask for list of tags and generate links in
                        "/home/vk/.filetags_tagfilter" containing symbolic
                        links to all files with matching tags and start the
                        filebrowser
  --filebrowser PATH_TO_FILEBROWSER
                        use this option to override the tool to view/manage
                        files (for --filter; default: geeqie). Use "none" to
                        omit the default one.
  --tagtrees            This generates nested directories in
                        "/home/vk/.filetags_tagfilter" for each combination of
                        tags up to a limit of 2. Please note that this may
                        take long since it relates exponentially to the number
                        of tags involved. See also http://Karl-
                        Voit.at/tagstore/ and http://Karl-
                        Voit.at/tagstore/downloads/Voit2012b.pdf
  --tagtrees-handle-no-tag "treeroot" | "ignore" | "FOLDERNAME"
                        When tagtrees are created, this parameter defines how
                        to handle items that got no tag at all. The value
                        "treeroot" is the default behavior: items without a
                        tag are linked to the tagtrees root. The value
                        "ignore" will not link any non-tagged items at all.
                        Any other value is interpreted as a folder name within
                        the tagreees which is used to link all non-tagged
                        items to.
  --tagtrees-link-missing-mutual-tagged-items
                        When the controlled vocabulary holds mutual exclusive
                        tags (multiple tags in one line) this option generates
                        directories in the tagtrees root that hold links to
                        items that have no single tag from those mutual
                        exclusive sets. For example, when "draft final" is
                        defined in the vocabulary, all items without "draft"
                        and "final" are linked to the "no-draft-final"
                        directory.
  --tagtrees-dir <existing_directory>
                        When tagtrees are created, this parameter overrides
                        the default target directory
                        "/home/vk/.filetags_tagfilter" with a user-defined
                        one. It has to be an empty directory or a non-existing
                        directory which will be created.
  --tagtrees-depth TAGTREES_DEPTH
                        When tagtrees are created, this parameter defines the
                        level of depth of the tagtree hierarchy. The default
                        value is 2. Please note that increasing the depth
                        increases the number of links exponentially.
                        Especially when running Windows (using lnk-files
                        instead of symbolic links) the performance is really
                        slow. Choose wisely.
  --ln, --list-tags-by-number
                        list all file-tags sorted by their number of use
  --la, --list-tags-by-alphabet
                        list all file-tags sorted by their name
  --lu, --list-tags-unknown-to-vocabulary
                        list all file-tags which are found in file names but
                        are not part of .filetags
  --tag-gardening       This is for getting an overview on tags that might
                        require to be renamed (typos, singular/plural, ...).
                        See also http://www.webology.org/2008/v5n3/a58.html
  -v, --verbose         enable verbose mode
  -q, --quiet           enable quiet mode
  --version             display version and exit

:copyright: (c) by Karl Voit <tools@Karl-Voit.at>
:license: GPL v3 or any later version
:URL: https://github.com/novoid/filetag
:bugreports: via github or <tools@Karl-Voit.at>
:version: 2018-01-26
·

Examples:

filetags --tags foo a_file_name.txt

… adds tag “foo” such that it results in a_file_name -- foo.txt

filetags -i *.jpeg

… interactive mode: asking for list of tags (for the JPEG files) from the user

filetags --tags "foo bar" "file name 1.jpg" "file name 2 -- foo.txt" "file name 3 -- bar.csv"

… adds tag “foo” such that it results in …

"file name 1 -- foo bar.jpg"
"file name 2 -- foo bar.txt"
"file name 3 -- bar foo.csv"

filetags --remove --tags foo "foo a_file_name -- foo.txt"

… removes tag “foo” such that it results in foo a_file_name.txt

filetags --tag-gardening

… prints out a summary of tags in current and sub-folders used and tags that are most likely typos or abandoned

Changelog

2013-05-16: first version on GitHub
2014-12-21: --list-tags-by-number, --list-tags-by-alphabet, and --tag-gardening
2015-01-02: tab completion for interactive tag input
- Example: entering myt + pressing TAB completes the entered string to mytag if mytag is found in the vocabulary or existing file tags
2015-12-11: shortcut numbers for removing tags
2016-01-08: shortcut numbers for top nine tags for adding tags
- Example: when filetags shows you Top nine previously used tags in this directory: with mytag(1) anothertag(2) oncemore(3), you don’t have to type in the tag names but use the numbers instead. Combinations of numbers are fine as well.
2016-08-21: mutually exclusive tags: see chapter below
2016-08-23: installable via pip install filetags
2016-08-26: --filter option requires all tags to be matching
2016-10-15: added tag gardening: vocabulary tags not used + tags not in vocabulary
2016-10-16: interactively adding tags: omit already assigned tags in shortcuts and vocabulary
2016-11-27: added existing shared tags to visual tags
2017-02-06: better help text for --filter option
2017-02-25: shortcut tags can be mixed with non-shortcut tags
- Example: mytag 49 anothertag does add tags mytag and anothertag and the shortcut tags 4 and 9
2017-04-09:
- interactively removing tags via -tagname:
  - Example: the tag input tagname -removeme adds the tag tagname and removes the tag removeme from the filename(s)
- try to find alternative filename if file not found
  - Example: if you try to tag file My file name.pdf which is not found, filetags tries to look for a different (unique and existing) filename that shares the same start of the file name such as My file name -- mytag.pdf. Very handy!
  - This happens a lof when you are interactively adding multiple tags one by one by simply re-executing the previous command line: the file name changes in between because of the previous tag(s) being added.
2017-08-27: when tagging symbolic links whose source file has a matching file name, the source file gets the same tags as the symbolic link of it
- This is especially useful when using the --filter option
2017-08-28:
- moved from optparse to argparse
- removed option --tag (in favor to --tags)
- added option shortcut for recursive: -R
- renamed option --imageviewer to --filebrowser and enabled its functionality
- added new feature --tagtrees
2017-08-31:
- improved screen output when renaming files
2017-09-03:
- --recursive option now works for linking files to tagtrees as well
- corresponding .filetags files get linked to the output of tagtrees as well
2017-11-11:
- removed command line options -r, -d, and --delete
  - keeping --remove as the only option for removing tags
  - removing tags was overrepresented in the command line options, blocking them to be used for other useful commands
- added =–tagtrees-handle-no-tag “treeroot” | “ignore” | “FOLDERNAME”=
- added --tagtrees-link-missing-mutual-tagged-items
2017-12-30:
- added --tagtrees-dir <existing_directory>
  - overriding the default target directory for the tagtrees result
- added --tagtrees-depth TAGTREES_DEPTH
  - allowing to override the default depth of tagtrees
  - use with care: especially on Windows a larger depth than 2 takes very long
- tagtrees now work with Windows using lnk files
  - in contrast to symbolic links, that have rather poor performance though: generation of tagtrees take way longer than on Linux or macOS
2018-01-30:
- fixed the pip3 package
2018-03-18:
- added more detailed statistics on usage of tag groups when doing tag gardening
- added internal data structure cache_of_files_with_metadata
2018-04-05:
- --tagtrees-dir can now be used for --filter
- much deeper support for Windows .lnk files:
  - tagging lnk files within tagtrees also tag their original files
  - .filetags files can now be .lnk files as well
  - the unit tests now work on Windows and test some Windows specialities
2018-04-18:
- comments in .filetags files that contain the controlled vocabulary
2018-04-25:
- added hints to =integratethis= to ease the Windows Explorer integration

Get the most out of filetags: controlled vocabulary `.filetags`

This awesome tool is providing support for controlled vocabularies. When invoked for interactive tagging, it is looking for files named .filetags in the current working directory and its parent directories as well. The first file of this name found is read in. Each line represents one tag. Those tags are used for tag completion.

This is purely great: with tags within .filetags you don’t have to enter the tags entrirely: just type the first characters and press TAB (twice to show you all possibilities). You will be amazed how efficiently you are going to tag things! :-)

Of course, you can remove existing tags by prepending a - character to the tag: -tagname. This also works interactively using the tab completion feature.

You can use comments in .filetags files: everything after a # character is considered a comment. You can even add a comment after a tag like ”mytag # this is a test tag”.

Mutually exclusive tags

If you enter multiple tags in the same line in .filetags, they are interpreted as mutually exclusive tags. For example, if your .filetags contains the line winter spring summer autumn, filetags replaces any season-tag with the new one. So if you tag the file …

example file -- summer anothertag.txt

… with the tag winter, it gets renamed to …

example file -- winter anothertag.txt

… without having to manually remove the tag summer.

Common mutually exclusive tags are draft final or confidential internal public.

tagtrees

This functions is somewhat sophisticated with regards to the background. If you’re really interested in the whole story behind the visualization/navigation of tags using tagtrees, feel free to read my PhD thesis about it on the tagstore webpage. It is surely a piece of work I am proud of and the general chapters of it are written so that the average person is perfectly well able to follow.

In short: this function takes the files of the current directory and generates hierarchies up to level of $maxdepth (by default 2, can be overridden via --tagtrees-depth) of all combinations of tags, linking all files according to their tags.

Consider having a file like:

My new car -- car hardware expensive.jpg

Now you generate the tagtrees, you’ll find links to this file within sub-directories of ~/.filetags, the default target directory: new/ and hardware/ and expensive/ and new/hardware/ and new/expensive/ and hardware/new/ and so on. You get the idea.

The default target directory can be overrided via --tagtrees-dir.

Therefore, within the folder new/expensive/ you will find all files that have at least the tags “new” and “expensive” in any order. This is really cool to have.

Files of the current directory that don’t have any tag at all, are linked directly to ~/.filetags so that you can find and tag them easily.

I personally, do use this feature within my image viewer of choice (geeqie). I mapped it to Shift-T because Shift-t is occupied by filetags for tagging of course. So when I am within my image viewer and I press Shift-T, tagtrees of the currently shown images are created. Then an additional image viewer window opens up for me, showing the resulting tagtrees. This way, I can quickly navigate through the tag combinations to easily interactively filter according to tags.

Please note: when you are tagging linked files within the tagtrees with filetags, only the current link gets updated with the new name. All other links to this modified filename within the other directories of the tagtrees gets broken. You have to re-create the tagtrees to update all the links after tagging files.

The option --tagtrees-handle-no-tag controls how files with no tags should be handled. When set to treeroot, untagged files are linked in the tagtrees target directory directly. The option ignore does not link them at all. The option FOLDERNAME links them to a directory named accordingly to the value which is a sub-directory of the tagrees target directory.

With the option --tagtrees-link-missing-mutual-tagged-items you can control, whether or not there will be an additional tagtrees folder that contains all files which lack one of the mutually exclusive tags. Using the example winter spring summer autumn from above, all files that got none of those four tags get linked to a tagtrees directory named “no_winter_spring_summer_autumn”. This way, you can easily find and tag files that don’t participate in this set of mutually exclusive tags.

Bonus: Using tags to specify a sub-set of photographs

FIXXME 2018-03-07: filetags now has the command line option of filtering files according to a tag. The method described below is the previous/old method. The new one requires only calling filetags with the --filter parameter. This has the advantage, that you can filter to any tag you like and not only to the sel tag as described below.

You know the problem: got back from Paris and you can not show 937 image files to your friends. It’s just too much.

My solution: I tag to define selections. For example, I am using sel for the ultimate cool photographs using filetags, of course.

Within geeqie, I redefined S (usually mapped to “sort manager”) to an external shell script (below) which creates a temporary folder (within /tmp/), symbolic links to all photographs of the current folder that contain the tag sel, and start a new instance of geeqie.

In short: after returning from a trip, I mark all “cool” photographs within geeqie, choose t and tag them with sel (described in previous section). For showing only sel images, I just press S in geeqie and instead of 937 photographs, my friends just have to watch the best 50 or so. :-)

The script vksel.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

TMPDIR="/tmp/imageselection"
IMAGEDIR="${1}"
IMAGEVIEWER="geeqie"
FILENAME=$(basename $0)

print_usage()
{
        echo
        echo "usage:   ${FILENAME} <directory>"
        echo
        echo "... starts a image viewer containing files tagged with \"sel\" in the current"
        echo "folder or the folder given as parameter 1."
        echo
}

STARTDIR=`pwd`

if [ "x${IMAGEDIR}" = "x-h" -o "x${IMAGEDIR}" = "x--help" ]; then
    print_usage
    exit 0
fi

if [ "x${IMAGEDIR}" = "x" ]; then
    IMAGEDIR="${STARTDIR}"
fi

if [ ! -d ${IMAGEIDIR} ]; then
    echo
    echo "  Please specify a folder containing the <directory>."
    echo
    print_usage
    exit 1
fi


## remove (old) TMPDIR if exists:
test -d "${TMPDIR}" && rm -rf "${TMPDIR}"

## create fresh TMPDIR
mkdir "${TMPDIR}"
cd "${TMPDIR}"


find "${IMAGEDIR}" -name '* -- *sel*' -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} ln -s {} . --
${IMAGEVIEWER}

cd "${STARTDIR}"

#end

Integration in geeqie is done with $HOME/.config/geeqie/applications/show-sel.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=show-sel
GenericName=show-sel
Comment=
Exec=/home/vk/bin/vksel.sh
Icon=
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Graphics;
hidden=false
MimeType=image/*;video/*;image/mpo;image/thm
Categories=X-Geeqie;

Integration Into Common Tools

If your system has Python 3 installed, you can start using filetags right away in any command line environment.

However, users do want to integrate tools like filetags also in various GUI tools.

The Integration.org file explains integration in some tools that allow external commands being added:

geeqie, a GNU/Linux image viewer I am using
Thunar is a popular GNU/Linux file browser for the xfce environment
Windows Explorer
FreeCommander, my recommendated alternative to Windows explorer

If you have integrated filetags in additional commonly used tools, please send me a short how-to so that others are able to get the most out of filetags as well.

Related tools and workflows

This tool is part of a tool-set which I use to manage my digital files such as photographs. My work-flows are described in this blog posting you might like to read.

In short:

For tagging, please refer to filetags and its documentation.

See date2name for easily adding ISO time-stamps or date-stamps to files.

For easily naming and tagging files within file browsers that allow integration of external tools, see appendfilename (once more) and filetags.

Moving to the archive folders is done using move2archive.

Having tagged photographs gives you many advantages. For example, I automatically choose my desktop background image according to the current season.

Files containing an ISO time/date-stamp gets indexed by the filename-module of Memacs.

How to Thank Me

I’m glad you like my tools. If you want to support me:

Send old-fashioned postcard per snailmail - I love personal feedback!
- see my address
Send feature wishes or improvements as an issue on GitHub
Create issues on GitHub for bugs
Contribute merge requests for bug fixes
Check out my other cool projects on GitHub

tuxlifan/filetags

filetags

Why

Installation

Installation Via Pip

Installation Via Source Code

Usage

Examples:

Changelog

Get the most out of filetags: controlled vocabulary `.filetags`

Mutually exclusive tags

tagtrees

Bonus: Using tags to specify a sub-set of photographs

Integration Into Common Tools

Related tools and workflows

How to Thank Me

Local Variables

tuxlifan/filetags

filetags

Why

Installation

Installation Via Pip

Installation Via Source Code

Usage

Examples:

Changelog

Get the most out of filetags: controlled vocabulary .filetags

Mutually exclusive tags

tagtrees

Bonus: Using tags to specify a sub-set of photographs

Integration Into Common Tools

Related tools and workflows

How to Thank Me

Local Variables

Get the most out of filetags: controlled vocabulary `.filetags`