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Re:Designing better file organization around tags, not hiera... by reacweb on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:49AM (#16771872)
Hello, I am trying to make an application for my wife to manage embroideries. I encounter almost all your issues. My wife has thousands of embroideries downloaded from internet. There are many duplicates (filenames not unique because of internationalisation and special characters). She needs to add tags to help search. She also needs groups of tags (tiger belongs to animals, ...). She also has metadata (origin of the file, which license applies to which file). Sometimes she modifies an embroidery. She needs to ensure that the original file is not modified and to keep a link between the two files. Sometimes there are groups of embroideries (for example letters) or there is documentation attached to an embroidery. It is a mess and I think that your work would help a lot to handle this kind of use cases. The current paradigm of directory tree is outdated and something smarter could be done.
Re:Designing better file organization around tags, not hiera... by magduf on Friday April 06, 2018 @10:02AM (#16773265)
How large are these embroidery files? I feel like this is something that a SQL database might be able to help with. It's probably not an ideal solution, but remember that a filesystem is really nothing more than a database, which organizes files on-disk in a particular way and indexes them so that you can find them. It obviously has serious limitations due to its hierarchical nature, which is why relational databases were invented, so using existing tools it's probably quite feasible to create an application that uses a SQL database to index all the embroidery files and store all this data on them (license, whether it's a derivative of another one, and tags), and then if they're too large to just store in the DB itself, just point to files in the regular filesystem.
Re:Designing better file organization around tags, not hiera... by kqr on Friday April 06, 2018 @12:53PM (#16774769)
To be pragmatic, it sounds like she needs a relational database more than a filesystem. (Whether or not filesystems should be more like relational databases is a hypothetical at present.)

If she actually manages that sort of data outside of an RDBMS I do suffer with her.

Re:Designing better file organization around tags, not hiera... by xtiansimon on Saturday April 07, 2018 @09:57AM (#16780709)
Your description is very similar to a problem I have with academic papers as PDFs. I was toying with `rsync` solution and naming conventions for original file names (as they were named when acquired) and renaming after review (EG. using the file system). Organizing the files with tags, collections would be a great improvement.
Re:Designing better file organization around tags, not hiera... by sturakov on Friday April 06, 2018 @08:19PM (#16778642)
If she is using Windows 10 (or similar), I've found http://tabbles.net/ is a pretty cool solution.