Re: File dialogs: Miscellaneous

[thristian atdot org]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 05:48:47PM -0400, Michael T. Babcock wrote:
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if your filesystem allowed you to easily add
> arbitrary metadata to a file like 'photographer, location, date shot, slide
> #, film case id' to your photos and then auto-link them to folders by those
> names?
> 
> photos/* (thousands of pictures numbered)
> 
> photos/By_Photographer/Michael/* (most of them, soft-links to the photos
> directory)
> photos/By_Location/France/* (a bunch of files, soft-links to the photos
> directory)
> 
> ... etc.  Using filesystems like ReiserFS, this becomes even more efficient
> and great for locating files later.  If you could do this _in-place_,
> creating pseudo-meta-data (linking to intelligently named directories), your
> file system would grow on you more.

Here's a crazy thought: Gnome is developing gnome-vfs, an abstraction
of ways to access strange and bizzare filesystems and
quasi-filesystems in a generic manner, much like the kernel is
supposed to do, but portable between kernels. Gnome is also developing
Evolution, a mailer where you can have mail-folders which are just the
results of database queries.

Could we add a vFolder filesystem to gnome-vfs? So we can use
gnome-find to say "Get me all files modified in the past three days",
and then save the query as a "vFolder" somewhere..

Incidentally, this kind of feature is going to be popular. Mozilla has
a similar feature, where you can save the result of bookmark-wide
search as a folder in your bookmarks.

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