Re: [Tracker] Tracker as digital asset manager

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 20/06/11 08:47, Ivan Frade wrote:
> HI Age,

Hi,

[snip]

> > - 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.

Well, there is an extension for Nautilus which you can use for tagging. 
But the support in tracker-needle is really not sufficient and I have 
been meaning to improve that for a while now.

> > - 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.

Well, you can do that with Nautilus of course. But command line or API 
wise, tagging is quite well supported (see tracker-tag).

> > 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.

Well :) the goal is also to provide "views" on your data, which is why 
we have an "image" matrix, a "category" view (listing data by type) and 
a "file" view for just plain file searching.

The tragedy is, the tag support is really lacking because it's not 
straight forward to do. There are 2 ways to do this, one is to use more 
complex (potentially slower) queries and the other is to do secondary 
queries to highlight tagging information.

But this is yet to do. All of this is well supported by the nautilus 
addon already.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.