Over the years I have, like most of you I'm sure, amassed a personal collection of many thousands of files, which for just as long I've either been meaning to organize or have in a very rudimentary way already organized via one scheme or another (Examples of said schemes are: arranging various files under various directories on my desktop, periodically archiving them offline, and utilizing a CD cataloging utility (DiscLib) to index all my offline files) to compound the problem, said files are now in quite a few disparate types of archive (ZIP and Tar files as well as mountable files) on disparate types of media, CD's, DVDs, internet servers, etc.
All that said, however, the time has finally come to completely organize my entire collection!
The concept of 'File Management'
Now what have I been needing all these years beyond a simple indexing capability and a filemanager or shell prompt? Very simple.. and this is the crux of my question.. What I really and truly lack are:
- the ability to quickly and comfortably attach custom metadata to my files (i.e. tags).
- An indexing and search capability that's tightly integrated with the shell (that's the way they used to term it in windows... what they meant was 'windows explorer integration' what I'm looking for here is integration with GNOME/Nautilus:)
I do not necessarily need a way to attach custom metadata directly to the file itself on the filesystem, but rather a locally maintained (meaning on my personal desktop) index of all my files, with all metadata there. Attributes I most want are tags and notes on each file, directory and archive, and also I need each file to have a digest, a hash of some sort to more-or-less uniquely identify it. This index must ideally be automatically updatable. If not, though, then at least it should be easily updatable. - I need the ability to run custom queries on this index.
- Given the above infrastructure, A framework that will give me the ability to generate and handle custom file-related events (examples: if a file on my desktop has been there for over two months then an alert should offer to put it in an archive and send it to fileserver X, or if a file exists on the desktop with a digest which does not exist offline, alert me that it needs to be put in an archive and put on CD).
So my question is this: I need a 'File Management Framework'. Does such a thing exist at a higher level of abstraction than GNOME?