Re: [Tracker] Tracker as digital asset manager

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade gmail com>]

HI Age,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Age Bosma <agebosma gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The features Tracker provides are quite close to what I'm looking for.
> It indexes documents, allows tagging for categorization and provides
> means to search for them in different ways.

In few words, Tracker has most of the features that you need, but it
is lacking a UI to offer them as a DAM (so far, our focus has been
internal application queries and plain search from the user).

> What it lacks, or at least what I was not able to find, is a bit more
> structure and some additional features:
> - Limit its indexing to a specific set of folders and/or documents

 There is "tracker-preferences" to adjust what directories is tracker
indexing and monitoring (following changes on them)

> - Limit its search to specific documents only without the need to build
> complex search queries each time

 If "specific documents" means "document A and document B", that looks
like responsability of the specific applications (E.G PDF reader). If
you mean "under this folder", "in this tag" or "only in PDF", then
Tracker can solve those queries... but it doesn't have a UI to build
them easily.

> - Provide a list of (manually) applied tags usable as filters instead of
> having to remember and search for them individually and manually

 We are missing a "tagging widget" or something similar in our UI.

> - Create a nested tagging structure

 Technically this is possible (stretching a bit the ontology), but so
far we didn't work in this use case.

> - Mass-tagging of documents using new and existing tags
> - Date filters (document creation, digitally as well as physically)

 Both are just UI limitations, because tracker has the information in its DBs.

> It basically comes down to Shotwell on steroids with Tracker as its base.
>
> Because Tracker already comes quit close, I wonder if there's already an
> alternative GUI available or plug-ins that provide the functionality
> above. Does it exist?
> If not, has it been proposed before and to what extend would it fit in
> the Tracker project?

 Tracker-needle is the closest we have, but its goal is only to find
the files. Either we extend tracker-needle to act more as a document
manager or is time to start a new project (docwell? :P). If you feel
like hacking, patches are welcome. Otherwise, adding these suggestions
in bugzilla is the best way to keep them alive.

 Regards,

Ivan