The way we organize content on computers hasn’t really evolved since the arrival of navigational file managers in late 1980s. We have been organizing files into directories for decades. Perhaps the biggest change anyone has managed since then is that we now call directories “folders” instead, and that we obscure the full directory tree now pointing users instead towards certain entry points such as the “Music”, “Downloads” and “Videos” folders inside their home directory.
It’s 2018 already. There must be a better way to find content than to grope around in a partially obscured tree of files and folders?
GNOME has been innovating in this area for a while, and one of the results is the Tracker search and indexing tool which creates a database of all the content it finds on the user’s computer and allows you to run arbitrary queries over it. In principle this is quite cool as you can, for example, search for all photos taken within a given time period, all songs by a specific artist, all videos above a certain resolution ordered by title, or whatever else you can think of (where the necessary metadata is available). However the caveat is for this to be at all useful you currently have to enjoy writing SPARQL queries on the commandline: Tracker itself is a “plumbing” component, the only interface it provides is the tracker commandline tool.
There is ongoing work on content-specific user interfaces that can work with Tracker to access local content, so for photos for example you can use GNOME Photos to view and organize your whole photo collection. However, there isn’t a content-agnostic tool available that might let you view and organize all the content on your computer… other than Nautilus which is limited to files and folders.
I’m interested in organizing content using tags, which are nothing but freeform textual category labels. On the web, tags are a very common way of categorizing content. (The name hashtags is probably more widely understood than tags among web users, but hashtag has connotations to social media and sharing which don’t necessarily apply when talking about desktop content so I will call them tags here.) Despite the popularity on the web, desktop support is low: Tagspaces seems to be the only option and the free edition is very limited in what it can do. Within GNOME, we have had support for storing tags in the Tracker database for many years but I don’t know of any applications that allow viewing or editing file tags.
Around the time of GUADEC 2017 I read Alexandru’s blog post about tags in Nautilus, in which he announced that Nautilus wasn’t going to get support for organizing files using tags because it would conflict to much with the existing organization principle in Nautilus of putting files into folders. I agree with that logic there, but it leaves open a question: when will GNOME get an interface that allows me to organize files using tags?
As it happened I had a bit of free time after GUADEC 2017 was finished and I started sketching out an application designed specifically for organizing content using tags.
The result so far looks like this:
This is really just a prototype, there are lots more features I’d like to add or improve too if I get the time, but it does support the basic use case of “add tags to my files” at this point and so I’ve started a stable release branch. The app is named Tagcloud and you can get it as a Flatpak .bundle of the 0.2.1 release from here. Note that it won’t autoupdate as this isn’t a proper Flatpak repo, just a bundle file.
Tagcloud is written using Python and PyGObject, and of course GTK+. I encountered several G-I bindings issues during development which mean that Tagcloud currently requires very new versions of GLib and GTK+ but the good news is that by using the Flatpak bundle you don’t need to care about any of that. Tagcloud uses Tracker internally and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make Tracker work better for application developers; these thoughts are quite lengthy and not really complete yet so I will save them for a separate blog post.
One of the key principles of Tagcloud is that it should recognize any type of content, so for example you can group together photos, documents and videos related to a specific project. In future I would also like to see GNOME’s content-specific applications such as Photos and Documents recognize tags; this shouldn’t require too much plumbing work since everything seems to be tending towards using Tracker as a backend, but it would of course affect the user interfaces of those apps.
I didn’t yet mentioned in this blog that a couple of months ago I quit my job at Codethink and right now I’m training to be a language teacher. So I imagine that I will have very little time available to work on Tagcloud for a while, but please do send issue reports and patches if you like to https://gitlab.com/samthursfield/tagcloud. I will be at GUADEC 2018 and hopefully we can have lots of exciting discussions about applying tags to things. And for the future … while I would like Tagcloud to become a fully fledged application, I will also be happy if it serves simply as a prototype and as a way of driving improvements in Tracker which will then benefit all of GNOME’s content apps.
Sam Thursfield 
The Documents app has got “Collections”. I’ve always assumed that was a fancy name for tags.
Even so, the Documents app is not content agnostic. But maybe it should be more inclusive? Images, for instance, are not necessarily photos. They may be documents, in a wider sense. If I place an image file in ~/Documents, I would like the Documents app to display it, in order to allow me to add it to one or more collections (tags) of related documents. Or, abstracting the file system, the Documents app could allow me to “import” any content.
I’ve always wanted something like this, incidentally, I’ve also been thinking about tag-based categorization lately. I’m sure I’ll check this out some time.
Q: Why “cloud” in “tagcloud”?
Good prototyping, hope you have an excellent time brainstorming in guadec.