Skip to content

Tagfile

Introduction

Search, index and tag your files and find duplicates.

The goal of tagfile is to manage and organize any sort of file (documents, music, pictures and videos in particular) in a way that is not tied to any file browser program, filesystem or operating system. The metadata that tagfile creates and uses to keep track of these files should be portable for use in multiple computer systems and be independent from any persistent mount points, filepaths or filenames.

logo Tagfile is primarily a unixy command-line application with a focus on simplicity, interactivity and scriptabilty through (shell) scripts. It is shaping up to be an amalgamation of features from applications such as locate, ls, find, file, cksum, sort and grep performed in constrained scopes of specific sets of files that are defined and controlled by the user in one or more sqlite databases.

It also is a package for Python (but the API is unstable at this point).

Homes

Features

  • scan all files in a directory (media-path) recursively
  • ignore files when scanning according to rules in user config
  • maintain a list of media-paths to prune/scan on a regular basis
  • index files with their checksums, size and MIME-type into a sqlite database
  • show a list of files in index, sortable by checksum, size and mimetype
  • find duplicate files, based on checksums
  • find files by matching on checksum, mimetype, size, name or substring of name and/or path
  • prune index from files that got moved or deleted
  • print results of list and find commands terminated with a null character to use for piping to other utilities like xargs.
  • configure aliases for certain commands and options (like git alias)

Features to be implemented in later versions:

  • remove duplicate files in the same directory
  • remove duplicate files interactively across directories
  • add user defined tags to files (using checksums, independent from filenames)

Ideas that may or may not be implemented in later versions:

  • ability to filter files using tags to create listings to use with other programs
  • ability to use tags to create directory structures of symlinked content

Status

tests coverage

Until a stable version 1.0.0 is ready, the API, CLI and config settings are subject to change from 0.x version to 0.x version, likely without offering migrations. Tagfile adheres to Semantic Versioning.

  • Current stable release: v0.1.0
  • Current dev/git version: v0.2.0a13

Tagfile has been written in a short time and used by me sporadically for 8 years after that. All code was contained in a single file script in ~/bin, available from Github only.

Starting in March 2023 I've decided to properly release it to PyPI and flesh out the current project structure, command interface and database handling before working on new features so it may live up to its name. Since at this moment in time, you cannot tag your files yet :)

Prerequisites:

  • Python 3.8 or later

Dependencies (automatically installed with pipx / pip):