A couple of announcements! One, I’ve open-sourced TagStudio! It’s still in a VERY early state and is packed full of bugs where features should be, so PLEASE keep that in mind! Second, I’m opening up a Discord server! Come chat about software development, creative projects, Obsidian, and get updates or help work on TagStudio! TagStudio GitHub: github.com/CyanVoxel/TagStudio Discord Server: discord.gg/hRNnVKhF2G
you know what is the best part about this video? I was thinking about how to organize data from various subjects uniformly and easily without too many repeats for categories or assets [planning a humanity from scratch project of data-hoarding called the "Senku initiative" with the three main parts being projects Black-Start, Eden, and Yggdrasil.]... and you helped majorly.... to think all that had to happen was to have the parent [category] tags within the child [asset] main tag {as a data structure}. amazing! seems that most innovations within humanity is simply... a step away. Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
When you say it has bugs and most likely to break I am a little worried when it comes to what would happen to my files if your little program is actually going to break my file or not so I'm going to just wait on this one for a while until you say it's okay for now, because I do want to make sure my files are not going to be deleted or any terrible form
You mean like "how do I move stuff without horses in my factory?" Leading to oh electric cars leading to cars in general? Or like "hey look if I put lots of light on this gem only monotonous boring light that goes in a straight line comes out. Pretty useless right?"
@@AshishSharma-rv8mz Its like asking how to search youtube for good content if there was no recomendation system. You have to have a topic you care about before hand. Heres some things from random domains for windows since thats what I use + WSLg for linux for the best of both:: glazewm: cutting edge window manager for windows powertoys: toys of useful tools like ocr, always on top, ect ahk v2: one of if not the best productivity automation language with a nice gui system suntimes: A very nice android app to tell when the sun goes down on a given day, when the moin comes out, ect warpclock: an android app for if you prefer to sleep for a duration rather than wake up at a specific time. hover zoom+: A broser extention that vastly improves the usability of tons of sights by allow you hover m images to see larger versions of them. single file: A browser extentoon that is by far the easiest way to download a page for personal safe keeping I could go on and on for hours of just tools I specificly know that solve real problems made in the open source space.
@@AshishSharma-rv8mz You have to have a topic you care about before hand. Heres some things from random domains for windows since thats what I use + WSLg for linux for the best of both:: glazewm: cutting edge window manager for windows powertoys: toys of useful tools like ocr, always on top, ect ahk v2: one of if not the best productivity automation language with a nice gui system suntimes: A very nice android app to tell when the sun goes down on a given day, when the moon comes out, ect warpclock: an android app for if you prefer to sleep for a duration rather than wake up at a specific time. hover zoom+: A broser extention that vastly improves the usability of tons of sights by allowing you hover images to see larger versions of them. single file: A browser extention that is by far the easiest way to download a page for personal safe keeping I could go on and on for hours of just tools I specificly know that solve real problems made in the open source space. And thats just what I know.
@@iMinestone YT deleted my comment for... reasons ig but I tried soundly, the free plan is a bit too limited, only allowing 10k files which is easy to reach when you make a variety of styles of music and/or do sound design
definitely could be added to this, just with a hashmap of file hashes in the tag database, if a file hash gets added twice, give one or both a 'duplicate' meta tag, and let the user choose which one to delete
Same here! I've been thinking of implementing a simple OpenCV-based image recognition to find duplicates but it can be incredibly slow for a lot of files. I had the initial idea of calculating 1 to 3 average colors of an image so it could very quickly discard images that are obviously extremely different
Which software Duplicating files and moving them? For me tagspaces is open source, if it no duplicate, it seem fine too. But the problem is opinionated over use more EXIF / XMP or use new format for tagging. Either we choose the new backward compatibile EXIF/XMP or we need tagspaces or few more to decided on new format/mechanism (backward EXIF) to store metadata
Eagle doesn't actually have you duplicate files though? If you use their folder import it'll move them into its library folder without you needing to do anything.
Watching this video has made me realize that file organization structures can be A LOT better than they currently are. It's pretty crazy how few solutions there are to just search through your stuff in a reasonable way.
This video made me wonder if it'd be possible to implement this directly in the filesystem (I'm thinking btrfs) so that tags would follow files that are copied/moved. The possibilities... too bad I wouldn't get paid for that, although it'd probably look decent on a résumé 🤷♂️
@@electric26 On NTFS they have alternate data streams which could work. Windows uses one for the 'this file was downloaded from the internet' warnings.
Current default systems are actually a step back from what they used to be. File explorer on Windows is just another browser, which is why it takes AGES to search for files. I JUST WANNA FIND ONE FILE IN MY DOWNLOADS!
Edit: just finished the video and my guy, I have to say the storytelling is very well done, was hooked the whole time. Well done, your channel will definitely blow up.
Please please please continue to develop this as far as you can take it. I’ve been putting off getting a proper NAS for a couple years, mostly because I didn’t want to figure out how to organize my files. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to find something from a long time ago because I decided to change how I did things. I had this exact same idea of being able to tag files, but hadn’t gotten around to looking for solutions yet. Your project is exactly what I want. Folders suck. Tags are 100% superior. I will definitely be taking a look at Tag Studio.
My dude... the algorithm gods were good to me today! Not only have I been trying to solve that EXACT issue, but I have to say: production quality on your content is freaking top tier. Like it pro level quality. I'm not a huge Obsidian user, but I kinda want to start going down that rabbit hole just because of your story telling skills. GG my man, gg!
I'm not sure if this is going to be a curse or a blessing because I've been working on my fucking Organization for years especially in the last couple of months. And now this shows up and I'm like oh my God I was just about to get myself situated, shit. LOL
Right?! I was gonna write basically the same comment. Those rare times when youtube's algorithm is like "here, have this gift" between mostly useless stuff based on what we only watched once !
I've been absolutely flabbergasted for years that something like this does not exist. Photo/asset organization is a universal problem in the gigantic world of graphic design and publishing, yet in spite of the technical capability already baked into every operating system, no app is tailored for this use case. I'm sure there is a complexity to it that I am not currently capable of understanding, but still. It's so puzzling how we have been so close for over a decade, with nothing to fill this gap.
The closest I've seen is making your own local duplicate of a Booru website where you can upload all your images and tag them all based on content and metadata and subtags and whatnot, almost exactly like the video but a website instead of an application
@@mablungbalrog424 This is pretty much exactly what occurred to me a few years ago. Image boorus have had tag systems for decades now, why the *hell* isn't there a robust local filesystem equivalent by now?!
For just Photo Lightroom has some great organisation features but its pretty much useless for everythings else and it has the other problems we've seen in that video
It's the worst feeling when you think you have got a game changing idea or product in your mind but then get to know someone has already made it while here you are thinking about it
I've wasted so much time renaming every single file i download to add descriptions, artist names, etc. This would honestly save me so much time, ty for making this
@@kintustis Except some things you wont have to type more than once because of the feature where you apply tags in bulk. I guess this is more for people who want hardcore organization, one plus of this system is that it would in theory be very easy to find whatever image you're thinking of, even if you forgot where you put it. With folders this isnt very flexible
You'll be pleased to know people have been doing that for decades. Depending on your OS there are tons of options out there, like Ritt, allTags, Tabbles, elyse, tagsforall and many, many others
@@prgnify never heard from them, but will look into them. In general, it seems to me that there are many options, but most of them provide tagging only on a very primitive level or have some similar serious drawback
@@GregHib Like Ritt? Also, IMO not looking like every other run of the mill Electron React app is a huge plus. I hate electron with a passion and even "modern" software like the one dude's making and announcing in the video that are not Electron apparently have to try and emulate the same look. Like, to me and many others TMSU does what we need and has the best looking interface of all. But I did not list it as an example in my previous comment 'cause I know WE are the weird ones and not the general pop. I doubt you even looked at all I listed, as just a couple of them "look like they were made in the 90s". But as I said, there are many other alternatives, like Leap (by ironic software), Tagflow, Tag tower... You can keep searching on your own if you want. I was just responding to the guy saying "someone finally realised how file management should be done" - a single example disproves this, regardless of how it looks. Even Stagsi offers better file management than normal dir/files. If you like the "Electron look" even if the software is not Electron based there is also Spacedrive - honestly a VDFS is in theory much more "advanced" than all of the db and or meta-file ones.
An open source and Linux compatible app like yours would be sooooo amazing. Please continue development if you'd like, and if not, consider publishing it so others can continue it!
adobe bridge is free but kinda mild. however if we sourcing internet picture and meme a lot, i mean.....blockchain solution with bittorrent hash(since bt also experiment on blockchain now), it might be extra....because of autotag of existing internet meme....or famous picture
This is the type of deep and comprehensive innovation I'd once expect with a Windows upgrade. And thinking about it, this could streamline near every workflow. My work and personal projects have been ballooning as I get older and my best solution is to catalog the directory tree in an ever expanding text file, back up critical files and replace the entire drive. If I remember an asset exists after several years (and the esoteric name I've given it), good for me. Similar situation for engineers, accountants and lawyers I know. (I hate to say this, knowing full well you're likely in scope creep hell) The only bonus features I'd personally need is a external reference library that tracks files on storage servers/external drives and a automated dynamic trend tags that tracks frequency, relevancy and associations data. But even without that, it'd be well worth the time to adopt this structure.
I've been using Eagle for a year, it's amazing and has the best UI I've seen after trying many file management software options out there. I'm glad to have found a new competitor. Your project has potential, and I support it. I would suggest you open source your project, and let's work together to make this even better than Eagle. In the future, Tag Studio could have an even better UI than Eagle, with animations, smoothness, performance, a plugin system, and privacy. Wish you all the luck!
Since it's your own app I think that it's definitely worth it still developing it. Even if you find something else in some other app that works apparently better than yours you'll end up thinking the same conclusions you came up with by the end of this video, they're just not as custom as the way you want they are. So, I think that the best thing you can go for it's just "stealing" all ideas you will come across, rielaborate and keep developing them on your TagStudio, that it's just amazing. I believe this as I've been noticing that in every kind of organizations I've had for any system, whatever it was(notes, idea, photos, clothes, projects), I've always been through the same steps: 1. Starting with enthusiasm without any customization by my own, just the basics that it offers (taking notes without thinking twice) 2. Starting with customization using what it comes with (getting an app and diving into the program features, ex. Notability) 3. Bothering by its limitation (okay, it get the work done thought I've seen that other programs can do something else interesting too (ex. Goodnotes) 4. Starting customizing also that tool with my workflow (ex. Goodnotes + my workflow) 5. Getting aware that probably there's something already prepared by someone else and that could probably overtake what I've been doing (maybe my workflow isn't that special as I thought...) 6. Getting aware that what I did instead it's useful as it has showed me the full map of possibilities, and probably if I had to start over I would go through the same steps, however, this time I would be conscious. These passages can be abstracted for any kind of activity I believe. Everything in the end will just collapse into the awareness that a good work won't ever stop getting better and better, though, we did our custom share, and the satisfaction from it is unrivalled. Lastly, there's no comparison between the look and feel you can pull out from your efforts and someone else work, just think about color palette, yours it's marvelous man!
As someone who went through a similar journey into madness when looking for a bookmark organiser with a decent tagging system, I've never related more to a video.
I'm a graphic designer and video editor. I've reorganized my files twice in the last month alone. I cannot tell you how many duplicates of files I find all over the place when I start or finish a project for a client, or how many general assets that should be singular files end up in 5 different folders across 3 clients. Plus, things like music and sound effects are a pain because of how many different genres just one song could fall under, or how many different descriptors could be used to describe a sound effect. A wooshing sound that is a higher pitch than the others but also sounds comedic and shouldn't be used in a cinematic video ends up in a folder titled "Wooshes/Memes," my third "Wooshes" folder. If TagStudio ever supports audio files such as regular ole .mp3 files and .WAV files, along with .mp4 and .mov files, I will definitely pick it up as it would be a fantastic addition to my tools
What you've created is essentially an image board. Image boards have tags that apply to media, the tags are very hyperspecific to be as descriptive as possible, and often break into categories like artist, character and general (they don't affect the tags, it just makes it a little more readable), but tags also have aliases and implications. A tag alias would be like auburn_hair -> red_hair, so when you set auburn_hair, or search for it, it's automatically replaced with red_hair, but the former is so commonly searched that there's an alias. Implications are just auto-applied tags. If your image has a red_hair tag, then that obviously implies the character HAS hair, so hair would also automatically be applied. The files themselves are typically stored by their md5 or sha hash, while a database manages which tags are applied to which files. Image boards in general go by a "tag what you see" rule of thumb, that is, when you're tagging an image, you pick out every tiny detail that you can see in the image and you add it as a tag. There are also tag wikis which describe what the tag means, what implications and aliases are associated with it, and also similar tags. For example, for "Bowser_(Super Mario)", you might have King_Koopa aliased to it, might implicate the koopa species as well as the super mario franchise, and might list the koopalings and other major mario characters in the tag wiki. What sets your program apart, though, is that image boards are usually a cloud-exclusive thing. This is the first time I've seen a local image board. If your program doesn't already have tag aliases and implications, you should consider adding them. It's rather simple, but saves a lot of effort, especially like with things you were agonizing about like one piece the anime vs one piece the manga. You could just have a one piece tag in the franchise/copyright tag category and then separate anime/manga tags such that a search for "one_piece color manga" would pull up an image you have that's from the one piece manga but in color. I'd say just study image boards in general. Danbooru in particular. Their tag system is fancy as hell. Like with your bulk tag adding thing you mention at the end, if you look at the way danbooru does tag editing, it just throws them all into a big textarea and you can type out all the tags one by one. They're space separated and the changes you make are quickly applied. When typing out part of a tag name, it'll give autocomplete suggestions so you're less prone to making a typo. Very simple and effective. It should also be mentioned that the terminology is a bit confusing. There are forums like 4chan that also refer to themselves as "imageboards", and indeed that's what wikipedia defines an image board as. But the focus on *chan boards has always been first and foremost as a fast-paced internet forum, whereas the *booru boards I'm talking about are focused on archiving and categorizing media, and discussion on them pertains to said media. How best to organize it, or just talking in the comments about how this specific image is neat. In fact I'm pretty sure danbooru's source code is on github, which is why there are so many *booru boards. Do it, be the first FOSS local imageboard.
There is Hydrus Network, pretty much a local booru (or at least similar in the core behavior). I don't like its UI though, but it could definitely be an inspiration as per the general booru tagging system like you already explained.
Was about to comment, as they essentially made a booru :D I personally use szurubooru for managing my content. But I get OPs struggle, cause I was looking through a lot as well, before settling on this (Probably not even half of the software they looked into is being shown in this video before deciding to write their own). Now 750k pictures later and plenty of automations I don't think I have the luxury to switch now any ways :D Even tho I sometimes wish to, as szuru was not made for this kind of load. And with the repo-owner barely being active I kinda needed to optimize some stuff myself, so it runs better. But all in all, I'm happy with it, including the community projects and apps supporting it.
This is genuinely the exact kind of app I’ve envisioned at night in bed when my mind is racing but I’m no where near good enough at programming to make it a reality. Please continue development and I’ll definitely purchase a copy.
First video of yours that I have watched and I love it. I love the style of the images in front of the continuous background and how you speak. Definitely watching more of your videos and I am going to stay tuned to find out more about Tag Studio
I haven't been this hype watching a video in a while. Every single issue and idea you had were literally mine it's crazy. But my mind was truly blown when I opened the comments and found that there's THOUSANDS OF US! How has there not been a software or many software that can do these things efficiently already. This is is so important.
PLEASE keep on this project. This is something I'll desperately need for the future, and Eagle doesn't sound super appealing to me atm. You really have the potential to be making one of, if not THE best file organizing system around.
Friend, what you are creating has SO MUCH value. I work on a lot of data governance initiatives. Microsoft (and other) solutions that classify (tag) and protect data are so customizable in the way you can define any attribute/key combinations you want - but implementing this is often incredibly cumbersome and complex. You’re relying strictly on Office or File Explorer to manage classifications or other attributes, and it’s not a fun experience if you’re working with LOTS of data. Especially when there’s data that, ya know… isn’t an Office file type or PDF 😂 I can think of SO MANY customers who would have benefited immensely from TagStudio. You’re trying to solve a personal problem, but you solved a HUGE enterprise problem and didn’t even know it. Your approach and process is what sets your solution apart from any other, you’re really onto something huge. I can’t wait for public release! Is there any way I can contribute or help you with this project? PS- Eagle isn’t that great, so don’t let it discourage you 😂
@@Alexander-iz4hy the fact that it uses sidecar files and duplicates data by copying it to another location. for casual personal use maybe this is fine, at scale this is horrendous.
@@joelthearchitectyeah I was like “damn Eagle looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for! Lemme go downl-“ then he said that part and yeah absolutely not
I want to extend a huge thanks to you for developing this software. You've saved me from developing my own program from scratch. I absolutely love that you've open sourced it and that it just uses simple JSON files. This is a game changer for me. Thank you so much.
I don't know about you, but after watching your video I can clearly see multiple advantages TagStudio has over Eagle: 1. your tag system has far more capabilities than Eagle's. Subtags and aliases can be a deal breaker! 2. no use of sidecar files at all 3. simpler GUI Wish you all the luck!
Also, Eagle seems to be much more of a resource hog if it has to DUPLICATE ALL OF YOUR FILES to make the sidecars work! An easier solution would be to have the sidecars separate but have data that links it to the original file and has the address stored and then have the sidecar address stored as metadata on the original image to secure the link.
@@TunaIRL this wouldn't work with files that are part of a project, for example a web dev folder, video project folder etc, since it splits up the files into individual folders within the library folder.
@@godboat. Yes, it's not meant for that so of course it isn't optimized for that. It's meant as an easy way to organize digital assets. They wrote about why they made it a library, you can go read if you like.
Holy shit! A lot of programmers could really learn from you my dude. Not only do you take the time to make something extraordinary, but you take the time to share it in a format that is digestible to a real audience so that it’s not immediately lost in the abyss or left in the realm of obscurity. Hats off to you! Also, the video quality is top notch.
The first thing I see missing right now is simply a better search. Excluding tags is a big thing (for example, a query like "shrek -meme" leading to shrek-tagged content that isn't tagged meme or a subtag of meme) But also more options: What if I want one of two tags? I can't do an "or" search. If we're talking feature creep, quality search is definitely a prime candidate to prioritize.
I actually cut out a section of the video I was originally was planning that specifically focused on search, talking about those exact things! I want a fully featured boolean search with "and", "or", "not", and the works for every piece of metadata and file attribute. Definitely a hefty feature, but it's absolutely necessary in my opinion!
@@cyanvoxel Yep, exactly! I actually had a note in my google keep to do that exact thing, except with a custom classifier system on top, so it could suggest tags. I had actually started in C#, but I hit a wall when I discovered ML.NET didn't allow for multi-label classification, and I had yet to restart from scratch. If your version is expandable, I'll actually probably just wait for the release and make a ML plugin.
@@cyanvoxel Another great possible feature would be custom albums that are just something like search query inform of an album. Also being able to add the filetype in the search would be awesome. Defining the minimum/maximum leanghts of certain filetypes such as audio and video files could also add alot. For example I could be searching for "shrek, memes,
@@abhilashpatel6852 its not in the video description or a pinned comment, and he even said in the video that he's NOT releasing it yet pay more attention
Please keep on developing this! Your tag and custom metadata system are soooo needed to organize huge amounts of (and different types of) files, which is something most other file org systems are not made for. I am also very interested in the power of your search/filter/display features :) I would definitely try the first release of this thing :D
I have been searching for such a file organization tool for YEARS. On top of it, in recent months I've started sorting and backing up my extended family's photos and memories and I've ran into these exact problems when trying to find the most intuitive way to sort and tag different photos for future viewings. I hope to someday use your organizer for these purposes, good luck in your journey!
Most Unix filesystems have something called "Extended file attributes" and NTFS has something called "Alternative File Streams". Both these features are a solution to the sidecar file problem and OSes use it to e.g. mark a file as downloaded from the internet. Even if you ended up with a Vault approach you could use it to add a unique id to files so name changes don't result in lost tags.
Windows supports Extended Attributes on NTFS, AFS is mostly just useful for unlimited length data: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes, MacOS supports them on its file systems linux has solid support: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes
@@rikwisselink-bijker I think they aren't really cross-platform; each file system probably has its own implementation, and also some don't support them (e.g FAT I think, and Windows displays a warning when data streams would be lost by copying between file systems).
I only use Windows, so I wrote my own NTFS file tagging software a while ago Works really great, but NTFS only Interestingly, I think you can hide massive files in tiny ones using NTFS... 😨
One thing I've learned from watching your vids for the last two hours is your attention to detail to UI. And it looks like tag studio will trump eagle in that regard. Therefore, its tag studio for me
Omg this is EXACTLY what I have been looking for for years. I was even planning on programming my own "Better Explorer" app because I couldn't find anything suitable, just like you. I hope you'll release your software to the public once you feel it's ready. Can't wait!
Granted there can be downsides, but if made into an Open Source Project you could collaborate and split up some of the work! Granted again downsides and all that, but worse case scenario it sits there and does nothing or someone forks it. Best Case Scenario it gets made faster with less headaches, and insights from all sorts of people make it work better/have features one wouldn’t have thought of!
Your approach to facing a program that promises a similar approach to your own is the best one that you could take Since its already a consolidated program with a userbase, it is as simple as making a google search to understand what the users are doing, how, and what are the pros and cons of the whole thing. It serves as material for a preemptive User Experience analysis. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to that Obsidian integration
I haven't got very far into the video yet, but I just wanna mention Hydrus. It's basically like having a booru image board on your local machine. It's a tags first system that lets you define "siblings" (tag aliases) and "parents" (tags that imply other tags). A really handy tool that is often overlooked
It's funny how I was thinking about this exact same thing today morning while downloading some videos I wanted to link to my Obsidian - but not wanting to overpopulate my Vault with media files I won't really watch that much. I think I want to be like you when I grow up lol. Amazing editing, amazing idea and I know it's going to pay off!
I feel like you would really like Hydrus! It looks janky - sure, but it works really well and runs an SQL under the hood, so its really fast to use. A lot of features, and a lot of community support.
This fantastic video is fun and informative, remember "good is good enough", waiting for never-ending perfection is pointless when you are overtaken by someone else. Consider doing more videos, you are an excellent candidate for more content videos.
Amazing! I think it would be cool to add CLIP running locally as an automatic tagging solution also enabling features like “search similar”, but we are talking about only for photos and maybe videos but still useful I think.
This is the first project I have seen that I am genuinely interested in contributing to if it goes open source. I have never heard of Eagle, but I'm already starting to love your vision more.
As someone that is dealing with TB of data for images, videos, renders... The idea of DUPLICATING my files in eagle is nightmarish. TagStudio sounds perfect for my needs. Subscribed for updates!
I came for the concept, I was entertained by the idea and I stayed for the humor and the memes (and also the existential crisis in the face of a own project)
Wow, i remember us having a brief exchange about eagle in your first community post. Love how the video turned out and that you highlight the absurdity of eagle's way of storing things in this video.
Haha! I remember you mentioning Eagle not too long after I'd become aware of it, but was still figuring out where I wanted to go with my project from there. That exchange definitely helped me think about things differently and gave me an overall more positive outlook on the project! Thanks for taking the time to comment, and sticking around to watch this one! 😁
Dear Mr. CyanVoxel, a program like yours is direly needed by many data hoarders such as my very own self. I personally do not appreciate the way Eagle is marketed, and the fact that it's supposed to be a 'reference library' means its development will likely have a narrow focus. I also strongly dislike the idea of duplicate files being created (some files can be 100+ GB). A tagging program like yours, offline-only and with no privacy breaches and no side-cars would be a dream come true. I'm hoping that such a program would be able to identify any file renames that happens while the program is not running. You've already made my Obsidian experience more enjoyable, hoping to continue seeing your workspace as it evolves. Cheers!
Stash, an organizer for pr0n fits the bill mostly with regards to offline focus and external metadata storage. Also handles file renames/ moves because it uses hashes
I love how you share your internal dialog throughout the process in all its darkness: doubt (am i going to get what i want) and compromise (should i rethink what i want, or ask for less). This makes me feel way less alone as i build my smb where every move, task and goal is basically a foray.
I've been struggling with tags and organization in my past, with Evernotes and hashtag plain text file and much more... until I no longer could keep up with it anymore. But it seems this is the holy grail of all tagging, and I hope to see it to full fruition. Also subscribed this channel, after seeing all the beautiful rendition, humor, and techie side that I can relate to.
You are making the solution of the future! Ive been frustrated with the file managing system for so long, and always wanted a tagging system, and your video sold me on the idea! I love the whole idea presentation. The editing and script was fantastic! you even compare to other apps not just to break down ideas, but show how they fall short compared to TagStudio. Sending much love, coffee and rubber duck sessions your way! ❤ I’m working hard to learn java and python and not once did I even think of creating my own File System! I’m thankful to all of your research, Kudos to you❤ hope to see you go far :)
Being frustrated by all the solutions already available out there is the biggest driving force to code a tool. I needed a fast and powerful image organization app myself and every 3rd party tool I've tried was a nuisance at best. I decided to develop my own and I basically abandoned the project now, because it already offers the functionality I needed. It is in the "press wrong thing at wrong time and it explodes" state but having deep understanding of the codebase allows me to avoid any issues. Been using it for my professional work for months and never had any problems with it. Being able to code your own workflow solutions that will perfectly match your mind is the best thing about being a programmer. It's nice to see TagStudio pretty much aligning with my ideas as well. Centralized database for metadata storage and powerful tag system for navigation is exactly what I needed - no messy sidecar files, no embedded data that can be randomly destroyed by other apps. I will definitely check it out and use it as an inspiration for my own software. Nice work!
> no messy sidecar files What's the problem with sidecar files? And if his program doesn't use sidecar files nor embed the data in the files, how does it work? It creates a database that links to the files' locations?
@@BakrAli10 That's what I would assume. I utilized a SQLite database for my application. I'm technically implementing an image board with a database I can easily search through. My first implementation actually used metadata files, until I realized, that I'm basically implementing a database I want to search through using tags, so why not use an actual database engine instead of reinventing the wheel? There is no reason why this data should be spread across thousands of files and reassembled in memory every time. I'm not implementing a file browser. I just have a "photo vault" containing all the data in a specified location and a database with metadata describing it. When I'm looking for files, I don't interact with the filesystem to parse directories or sidecar files, I query the database and get my response instantly. It's a specific solution for my specific problem and I'm quite happy with the result.
@@gumiennik7934 > There is no reason why this data should be spread across thousands of files and reassembled in memory every time. yeah, that makes sense now that I think about it this way. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
@@bobsmithy3103 My app currently depends on raylib for drawing stuff but I'm in the process of implementing my own thing in OpenGL. Always wanted to learn basic graphics programming and this project was a perfect opportunity for an entry point into the GPU world.
This is my first time ever coming across this channel, and I am glad UA-cam recommended me this video. I used to have a similar problem in the past where I had way too many things saved (I still do) and it was near impossible to find the exact things that I needed. I did think of making a program myself, but I was far too lazy to do so. What you are making is the exact thing that I wanted, an app that can categorize files by tags and have the ability to search by filtering tags and / or extra (meta)data that I specify (such as title, description, etc). Of course, my idea was as simple as having multiple tags, but this is far greater than anything that I could have imagined. I will also be honest about one thing. Eagle does seem like a solid alternative (and I'll have to admit that design-wise and feature-wise, it is spectacular), but like you said, it doesn't really cover what **you** need it for. Quite frankly, it doesn't cover what **I** need it for either. The fact that it stores copies of the pictures is a turnoff for me. Not only that, but moving files or renaming them has the side effect of possible disconnection from its data. If I were given a choice between Eagle and the program that you are making, I would 100% pick your program (and that is what I will do if you plan on making it public). Finally, because this is your personal program, you have the liberty to customize it however you'd like, whether that means a different UI or functionality. If you plan on making it open-sourced as well, then in my eyes (and in most programmers' eyes), it will have won over Eagle by a landslide. Plus, if you plan on making it open-sourced, you have the open-sourced community helping you add features which will eventually surpass whatever "competition" you have. Overall, amazing video and amazing product. I am amazed by how deeply you thought about the tagging system and how much effort was put into it. I cannot wait to see the finished result. Two questions though, are you planning on making it public, and if so, do you plan on making it a paid product, or a free open-sourced project?
Thats exactly what I've been searching for since forever! Wanted to do it myself as well, but the project seemed too daunting. Props to you for actually putting in the effort!
something very important, just for usability, would be the option to look through a tag tree as if it was a folder structure. like you could open the "media" tag and see first tags for "games" "anime" "manga" ect, and then the files only taged with media, not useful for finding specific things directly but very useful for seeing how stuff is actually linked together. another very useful thing would be a tree showing what tags are tagged by other tags. edit: also the ability to exclude tags from searches, just incase that was somehow missed. and the ability to set tags to be excluded by default without having to manually exclude them
i was having issues with using similar filenames a lot for my artwork and having isses with my organisation. i solved this by putting the month and day and what number drawing it was. i like my system. if i remember what month i did something, i can easily find it. if i can remember what year it was, though, less so, since i have to navigate between 12 different folders checking and double and triple checking.... im glad to hear about a new file organisation option. i dont think id use it because i dont really work by tags, but it sounds like its extremely useful for those that do.
As someone who tried to go down this road years ago when it came to trying to organize and sort the hundreds of hours of video and photos I came to the same frustrating conclusion. I eventually just landed on the acceptance that I will just have to have insanely good folder structure and organizing. If you made this available for Linux (all of my videos and photos are hosted on a self hosted server) this would be a game changer for me personally.
Aaaagh I came to the same conclusion too! My folders are now all hyperspecific but it takes forever to get anywhere and it doesn't help that Windows search takes 3-5 business days to find anything even on my NVMe SSD.
@@Carsian may I introduce you to voidtools' Everything search program? It indexes all the files on your system and allows instant search results. It is blazingly fast!
This seems like a fantastic application idea for those of us who are very nitpicky, if you want more hands on the project, you can think about opensourcing it. I would absolutely like to help.
I can't say how much I enjoyed watching this video. For so many reasons. First, I can completely empathize with everything you said. Each sigh, each "Oh, come on". I'm a mess. I thought about making a tagging system so many times (though I didn't actually start it - yet). To add one thing you apparently did not find: I used DevonThink when I still used a Mac. It does a lot of things really well (not having tagged tags, but at least a hierarchical approach that works well enough). It's not cross platform, so that's a bummer. And I think tags need to be an orthogonal mechanism, not part of an App that encapsulates data, even if it where open source or cross platform. My personal approach to finding a solution for the mess is a bit different though. Tags are great, because they are simple and mostly unstructured. But then you start wanting meta information on tags (colors), meta information on tag assignments (when did I tag it, give the assignment a property I can edit, make a tag assignment a relation or relatable). And then things quickly get out of hand, as they always do. Would love to have a chat with you about that... But anyway, thanks for making this video, I absolutely loved it!
This software is the kind of software that i have been looking for years, kudos for the development and keep the spirit high until release, this software has so much potential.
Haha this has come full circle; I was just starting to work on my own tag-based file manager with a tag system very similar to yours, albeit as a PWA-adjacent design focused on image gallery display and good UX. It's good to see you're continuing with your own originality! I think I'll do the same too!
There's also a little tool which supports tagging (primarily for images) called Hydrus; a cool piece of kit but with the exact same critical downside of Eagle - duplicating files to keep them 'safe'. If you're needing a tagging and management system to deal with an unworkable amount of data, chances are that data is quite bulky too. Duplicating 200GB+ of files? That's a preeeeetty big ask. As soon as you brought it up I was gonna give it a look but the fact it duplicates files is an immediate unworkable dealkiller. If you avoid that problem, then you'd have the exact thing I've been looking for since forever, purely because it doesn't have that (and the other) mentioned downsides of things which do this already. Edit: I didn't realize your channel was so small because of the high production quality of the video, lol. The presentation style and flair you've got going is excellent.
Yeah I was pretty surprised he did not talk about Hydrus Network. They even both work as some Python code with a Qt front end, and is open source, free of charge.
I mean, you can just ask hydrus to delete the old files on import... And if you just want to link to the files in obsidian, hydrus saves files in a very predictable manner(hash + hash folder) that you can easily copy. Or, like I do myself, you can use the hydrus api to dynamically display images in obsidian, based on the tags you want
@@Athrunen I find it unacceptable to delete my original files and completely remove original folder structure and filenames to conform to a new system. This is the opposite of keeping things interoperable. Hydrus also seems to only focus on a limited selection of file formats. You're probably not using Hydrus to organize your financial files, for example. We're being shown that this kind of re-organization ISN"T necessary here in this video.
OPEN SOURCE THIS CRAP NOW, WE NEED IT Maybe for me one important thing would be mobile support becouse i barely download images to my pc, but this project is incredible indeed
@@MetalheadAndNerd i suggested open source because I'm interested in seeing the source and making changes if i see i can better some area, I'm not sure i will but many people could contribute and better the software if it reaches sufficient people
This is my favorite UA-cam video. Period. File organization, organization in general, this kind of thing is my JAM! My ADHD brain loves this kind of organization content. This project seems like such a time saver as well as an amazing way to remove stress from your life. I wonder how this project is going now, and I really hope that you will release a sequel. In the far far future, I wonder if you will expand this project beyond photos. :D
Something I learned from developing a few open source applications is to not get discouraged because someone did it first and maybe even better. If anything I find it encouraging, eventually getting close in features and then even doing some things better, or at least what feels better to me. I think there is a very good reason many open source apps have acronym names starting with YA for yet another.
I haven't even watched the video yet and omg I've been doing the exact same thing, the past few months I been trying to rethink how to look for files and folders semantically, and the first couple things that came to mind were storing info in the file's metadata but then that just isn't good enough for videos where I wanna store transcriptions, vector data, links, and tags that are linked with other tags, so then my best option was to build a database where all the nots, tags, transcriptions for videos and all other stuff is stored on the database, along with a reference property that points to the file, but this is where I got a little lost, not knowing how to maintain this reference after the file is moved. I feel like the folder structure is not good at all for finding things. The only use for folder structure is categorizing very distinct things on the surface, like maybe an archive folder, a school folder and a projects folder, but even then, I often forget whether the thing I want was a school project or a personal project, so going back and fourth through folders is just really time consuming. I love your work, I found your channel 2 weeks ago and your Obsidian vault inspired me to work on mine, and this video couldn't reach me at a better time than now, the past week I've been building the file explorer and I've been hitting roadblocks, trying to rethink file management as a whole, and I bet I will find very invaluable information here. Edit: I'm 8 minutes in, I fully understand and feel the exact same as you when it comes to picking out the existing solutions. They are just NOT GOOD ENOUGH for me LMAO
This is a really cool video. Instant subscribe. Love the storytelling, I was hooked till the end. I have been in the same dilemma myself... The solution I'm considering is Immich because it has auto tagging ML features like Google photos but haven't implemented it yet. And I guess the ML requires a lot of GPU... IDK I haven't used it yet If anyone has used Immich your feedback back will be greatly appreciated. If you have other suggestions it will be great. The thing I want... - Cross Platform - Good Auto Taging (Like google photos) - Good UI/UX - Works with various file types - Extra point for opensource and/or free
ig tensorflow has light versions that can run locally But open source is top priority for me, as i don't want program instantly going away... after years of saving files also wanted to be fast and responsive (which is hard in a file manager)
Man, this is exactly how i envisioned the tagging system in my head, but i have up in my research for the applicable solution. Really glad this video has popped up in my recommendations
this has been on my mind for weeks. finally just found the time to start working on this idea, so I looked into it for a bit and the algorithm just gave me this video. i got the same feeling as you had with eagle but its ok since it was still in the idea phase. please release this!!!
The sidecar files approach seemed a good idea to not tamper the files and changing their checksum. One of the issues that you mentioned (needing to move the sidecar file alongside the original file) would be solved using a FUSE filesystem. TL;DR: FUSE is a filesystem that you can program yourself to do whatever you want whenever you open, modify, or delete any file. You could make one that moves de sidecar file alongside the original file itself. You can hide the sidecar file itself to avoid other programs to tamper with it. I have seen a cross platform implementation, is called RClone, which basically mounts cloud storages (like mega, Dropbox, google drive), making it able to access all these files with any file explorer. You can also mounts additional "layers", like a FUSE filesystem that encrypts all the files put in a folder (is what i use to encrypt all my files stored in Mega). Though, the final approach you took looks good enough, is better having it done that daydreaming about a proper way but out of my skill boundary to do it😂. Love the video.❤
Hey, I'm one of the creators of the Eagle videos you have mentioned towards the end there and just wanted to say.. what a journey! 😮 Great video. 👍 I remember myself being in the exact situation. Started brainstorming on how to make my own tagging solution and almost hired another developer to help me out with it as I am more of a web dev myself - only to find out about Eagle. 😅 Let me be clear here. I think that some still don't quite understand the benefits of the files being "duplicated" inside of an Eagle library. Once you import them, they will sit in their unique folder for the rest of their life unless you delete them. This is absolutely amazing as you can organize your file into multiple folders or add various tags inside of Eagle without ever changing the physical location of the file itself. My library has more than 200.000 files and searching takes less than a second. The results are immediate every single time! In a perfect world, file systems on Windows or Mac would behave just like the Eagle App, where moving a file from one location to another wouldn't unlink your files from Obsidian, DaVinci Resolve, etc. This would only be possible if the file itself kept track of its metadata like in which folders it is saved, what sorts of tags are added and so on without changing its root location. Eagle does all of this for you on top of your existing file system and the devs have promised to make the application open-source in case the company behind it goes bankrupt. Oh, and did I mention that it has a duplicate finder? There's a good chance you have many duplicates in your existing folders. If you import everything into Eagle, duplicates will only be saved once but still point to the folders these files where saved in previously. Let's just say you had a large 10GB video in 5 folders for whatever reason. Inside of Eagle, it would still be in those 5 folders, but only take space for 10GB instead of 50GB. On top of that, Eagle 4.0 comes with its own plugin system and all users are eagerly awaiting more devs to jump the ship to accelerate what this awesome piece of software can do already. I have seen plugins from other devs for upscaling with AI, compression of files to different formats like webp straight from Eagle and a lot more. There is an active discord group that people can join to talk to other devs and Eagle and I will soon publish more tutorials about the app and how I personally use it as a video creator. Keep it up. Amazing quality content! ❤
Hey there Valentin, thanks so much for watching!! Your video is actually what helped me discover Eagle in the first place! 😁 I do think it's a great app and is probably perfect for what a lot of people are looking for (as is clear from your own testimony!), and also believe there's some confusion surrounding the internal structure from what I've seen people describe, as you only *need* a single copy of files inside your Eagle directory, and then Eagle obfuscates that so you don't really need to worry about where your files are being stored from that point on. While this works just fine for organizing things that I would otherwise try to keep in my own folders, the deal breaker I have with Eagle is how this can break compatibility with other programs and *their* required file structures. Since I have a lot of programs (Blender, for example) that rely on existing file structures, or programs that require resources to be inside their *own* folder structure, I'm unable to use Eagle to tag and organize those files since it would involve breaking the required file structure. It's one of those things that's *so close* to working for me but just has that big caveat. (Unless Eagle is doing something *really* fancy with symlinks that I might be missing!) I'm very pleased to hear that it's been working great for you though, and it's on my list of programs to recommend to people if it fits their use cases! All of the 4.0 features and plugin system is very exciting as well, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the program goes from here! Thanks again for taking the time to drop a comment!
Seems similar to spacedrive, which is trying to solve the whole OS agnostic/cross platform file system backed by a database tagging/metadata system. I dont think the tags go as in depth as what youre looking for but im watching that project closely, looks promising if it gets more stable
![I Open-Sourced My Tagging Program, Here’s How It Went... [TagStudio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/x_x3FYfykgc/mqdefault.jpg)
A couple of announcements! One, I’ve open-sourced TagStudio! It’s still in a VERY early state and is packed full of bugs where features should be, so PLEASE keep that in mind! Second, I’m opening up a Discord server! Come chat about software development, creative projects, Obsidian, and get updates or help work on TagStudio!
TagStudio GitHub: github.com/CyanVoxel/TagStudio
Discord Server: discord.gg/hRNnVKhF2G
Are you happy with having done this? Have you seen positive contributions? Just curious.
Please make it a .exe
you know what is the best part about this video? I was thinking about how to organize data from various subjects uniformly and easily without too many repeats for categories or assets [planning a humanity from scratch project of data-hoarding called the "Senku initiative" with the three main parts being projects Black-Start, Eden, and Yggdrasil.]... and you helped majorly.... to think all that had to happen was to have the parent [category] tags within the child [asset] main tag {as a data structure}. amazing! seems that most innovations within humanity is simply... a step away.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
When you say it has bugs and most likely to break I am a little worried when it comes to what would happen to my files if your little program is actually going to break my file or not so I'm going to just wait on this one for a while until you say it's okay for now, because I do want to make sure my files are not going to be deleted or any terrible form
@@NoahtheGameplayeruse the program but have a backup of those files just in case.
I need TagStudio NOW. My files on my computer is a mess.
This person also makes data messes
Looking forward to your software
Me too but i dont care lol
SAME!!
ON MY ANDROID DEVICES TOOOO
Yes Really
It's so rare to see a project that stems from a single problem that people actually face, rather than a general concept that works it's way backwards
You definitely havent looked much at the open source space then.
@@Dogo.R how to browse? Sources?
You mean like "how do I move stuff without horses in my factory?" Leading to oh electric cars leading to cars in general? Or like "hey look if I put lots of light on this gem only monotonous boring light that goes in a straight line comes out. Pretty useless right?"
@@AshishSharma-rv8mz Its like asking how to search youtube for good content if there was no recomendation system. You have to have a topic you care about before hand.
Heres some things from random domains for windows since thats what I use + WSLg for linux for the best of both::
glazewm: cutting edge window manager for windows
powertoys: toys of useful tools like ocr, always on top, ect
ahk v2: one of if not the best productivity automation language with a nice gui system
suntimes: A very nice android app to tell when the sun goes down on a given day, when the moin comes out, ect
warpclock: an android app for if you prefer to sleep for a duration rather than wake up at a specific time.
hover zoom+: A broser extention that vastly improves the usability of tons of sights by allow you hover m images to see larger versions of them.
single file: A browser extentoon that is by far the easiest way to download a page for personal safe keeping
I could go on and on for hours of just tools I specificly know that solve real problems made in the open source space.
@@AshishSharma-rv8mz You have to have a topic you care about before hand.
Heres some things from random domains for windows since thats what I use + WSLg for linux for the best of both::
glazewm: cutting edge window manager for windows
powertoys: toys of useful tools like ocr, always on top, ect
ahk v2: one of if not the best productivity automation language with a nice gui system
suntimes: A very nice android app to tell when the sun goes down on a given day, when the moon comes out, ect
warpclock: an android app for if you prefer to sleep for a duration rather than wake up at a specific time.
hover zoom+: A broser extention that vastly improves the usability of tons of sights by allowing you hover images to see larger versions of them.
single file: A browser extention that is by far the easiest way to download a page for personal safe keeping
I could go on and on for hours of just tools I specificly know that solve real problems made in the open source space. And thats just what I know.
As a sound designer, who combs thru endless number of libraries for that right sound, this pleases me
Have you tried Waves Cosmos or ASDR Sample Manager?
@@icanusernamebetterthanyou3853 ADSR is really buggy on my potato, crashes all the time so I don't bother using it
Have you tried Soundly?
@@iMinestone YT deleted my comment for... reasons ig but I tried soundly, the free plan is a bit too limited, only allowing 10k files which is easy to reach when you make a variety of styles of music and/or do sound design
@@iologos2052 thats true! Didnt consider the free one. But maybe „explorer“ from soundparticles is something for you?
The number one feature I am looking for is a rock solid trustworthy way to find and eliminate duplicates that I have amassed over the decades.
The closest tools ive found are dupeguru and VDF.
definitely could be added to this, just with a hashmap of file hashes in the tag database, if a file hash gets added twice, give one or both a 'duplicate' meta tag, and let the user choose which one to delete
Same here! I've been thinking of implementing a simple OpenCV-based image recognition to find duplicates but it can be incredibly slow for a lot of files. I had the initial idea of calculating 1 to 3 average colors of an image so it could very quickly discard images that are obviously extremely different
fdupes is interesting, even though the man page is not so good ... only played with it though
Have you tried czkawka?
Duplicating files and moving them from their original place is honestly a dealbreaker. ( talking about Eagle, not TagStudio )
So much wasted space !
Which software Duplicating files and moving them? For me tagspaces is open source, if it no duplicate, it seem fine too. But the problem is opinionated over use more EXIF / XMP or use new format for tagging. Either we choose the new backward compatibile EXIF/XMP or we need tagspaces or few more to decided on new format/mechanism (backward EXIF) to store metadata
@@2dstencil847Eagle
Eagle doesn't actually have you duplicate files though? If you use their folder import it'll move them into its library folder without you needing to do anything.
@@2dstencil847 You didn't watch the whole video did you lol
Watching this video has made me realize that file organization structures can be A LOT better than they currently are. It's pretty crazy how few solutions there are to just search through your stuff in a reasonable way.
This video made me wonder if it'd be possible to implement this directly in the filesystem (I'm thinking btrfs) so that tags would follow files that are copied/moved. The possibilities... too bad I wouldn't get paid for that, although it'd probably look decent on a résumé 🤷♂️
@@electric26 As a fellow btrfs user I'd also love to see that implemented
@@electric26 On NTFS they have alternate data streams which could work. Windows uses one for the 'this file was downloaded from the internet' warnings.
@@electric26 extattrs seem like a good place. I think the problem is that things like cp might not preserve them when the file gets moved.
Current default systems are actually a step back from what they used to be. File explorer on Windows is just another browser, which is why it takes AGES to search for files. I JUST WANNA FIND ONE FILE IN MY DOWNLOADS!
Edit: just finished the video and my guy, I have to say the storytelling is very well done, was hooked the whole time. Well done, your channel will definitely blow up.
Thank you so much! Really glad you enjoyed it! 😁
@@cyanvoxel The pictures of cat helped btw
@@rawallonagreed, kitties are just perfect
link to get it?
Agreed, the effort put into this video combined with the high quality videos was top notch. I was hooked the whole way through.
Please don’t let this project down this could benefit a lot of people
Please please please continue to develop this as far as you can take it.
I’ve been putting off getting a proper NAS for a couple years, mostly because I didn’t want to figure out how to organize my files. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to find something from a long time ago because I decided to change how I did things. I had this exact same idea of being able to tag files, but hadn’t gotten around to looking for solutions yet. Your project is exactly what I want.
Folders suck. Tags are 100% superior. I will definitely be taking a look at Tag Studio.
GIME TAGSTUDIO PLS
this is HUGE. Along with Obsidian, you're about to singlehandedly change many people's digital lives for the better. Cheers!
Hydrus is pretty much this
My dude... the algorithm gods were good to me today! Not only have I been trying to solve that EXACT issue, but I have to say: production quality on your content is freaking top tier. Like it pro level quality. I'm not a huge Obsidian user, but I kinda want to start going down that rabbit hole just because of your story telling skills. GG my man, gg!
I'm not sure if this is going to be a curse or a blessing because I've been working on my fucking Organization for years especially in the last couple of months. And now this shows up and I'm like oh my God I was just about to get myself situated, shit. LOL
Right?! I was gonna write basically the same comment. Those rare times when youtube's algorithm is like "here, have this gift" between mostly useless stuff based on what we only watched once !
I've been absolutely flabbergasted for years that something like this does not exist. Photo/asset organization is a universal problem in the gigantic world of graphic design and publishing, yet in spite of the technical capability already baked into every operating system, no app is tailored for this use case. I'm sure there is a complexity to it that I am not currently capable of understanding, but still. It's so puzzling how we have been so close for over a decade, with nothing to fill this gap.
That’s just wrong. Adobe had a solution for decades. But if you look at more modern solutions, you got Eagle. Far better than this
The closest I've seen is making your own local duplicate of a Booru website where you can upload all your images and tag them all based on content and metadata and subtags and whatnot, almost exactly like the video but a website instead of an application
@@mablungbalrog424 This is pretty much exactly what occurred to me a few years ago. Image boorus have had tag systems for decades now, why the *hell* isn't there a robust local filesystem equivalent by now?!
For just Photo Lightroom has some great organisation features but its pretty much useless for everythings else and it has the other problems we've seen in that video
@@MediaMunkeei use hydrus client, it doesn't have a crazy looking ui but it works
It's the worst feeling when you think you have got a game changing idea or product in your mind but then get to know someone has already made it while here you are thinking about it
oh yeah welcome to my life
Been there. My competitor was better in every way and free to self host LOL it happens
but I like open source
I've wasted so much time renaming every single file i download to add descriptions, artist names, etc. This would honestly save me so much time, ty for making this
i'm a giant image collection nerd, i've got around 20k meticulously sorted files
@@KILOPOWER WITH JUST FILE NAMES???????????????????? insanity. please look into the things mentioned in these comments
My guy i never rename anything unless it's a duplicate in the same directory, how do you even live
You'll still be typing in all of these things, but just in a super complicated tacked-on database
@@kintustis Except some things you wont have to type more than once because of the feature where you apply tags in bulk. I guess this is more for people who want hardcore organization, one plus of this system is that it would in theory be very easy to find whatever image you're thinking of, even if you forgot where you put it. With folders this isnt very flexible
Finally someone realized how file management actually should be done
You'll be pleased to know people have been doing that for decades. Depending on your OS there are tons of options out there, like Ritt, allTags, Tabbles, elyse, tagsforall and many, many others
@@prgnify never heard from them, but will look into them. In general, it seems to me that there are many options, but most of them provide tagging only on a very primitive level or have some similar serious drawback
@@prgnify How about some examples that don't look like they were made in the 90s?
@@GregHib Like Ritt?
Also, IMO not looking like every other run of the mill Electron React app is a huge plus. I hate electron with a passion and even "modern" software like the one dude's making and announcing in the video that are not Electron apparently have to try and emulate the same look.
Like, to me and many others TMSU does what we need and has the best looking interface of all. But I did not list it as an example in my previous comment 'cause I know WE are the weird ones and not the general pop.
I doubt you even looked at all I listed, as just a couple of them "look like they were made in the 90s".
But as I said, there are many other alternatives, like Leap (by ironic software), Tagflow, Tag tower...
You can keep searching on your own if you want.
I was just responding to the guy saying "someone finally realised how file management should be done" - a single example disproves this, regardless of how it looks. Even Stagsi offers better file management than normal dir/files.
If you like the "Electron look" even if the software is not Electron based there is also Spacedrive - honestly a VDFS is in theory much more "advanced" than all of the db and or meta-file ones.
@@raxneffWindows and mac both have tag structures and file system apps
Every good program starts with a Thanos moment, great job on the video and congrats on saying “I guess I’ll just do it myself”, you should be proud
An open source and Linux compatible app like yours would be sooooo amazing. Please continue development if you'd like, and if not, consider publishing it so others can continue it!
@syber-space is right !
adobe bridge is free but kinda mild. however if we sourcing internet picture and meme a lot, i mean.....blockchain solution with bittorrent hash(since bt also experiment on blockchain now), it might be extra....because of autotag of existing internet meme....or famous picture
TMSU exists, and doesn't duplicate or even touch the files at all.
@@nuclear-salmon For me, this is a downside, since when you copy the files to backup or a usb stick to share, the tags are lost.
@@Peter-House-Jr just include the database
your work on this video is phenomenal. dude HOW 🤯
This is the type of deep and comprehensive innovation I'd once expect with a Windows upgrade. And thinking about it, this could streamline near every workflow. My work and personal projects have been ballooning as I get older and my best solution is to catalog the directory tree in an ever expanding text file, back up critical files and replace the entire drive. If I remember an asset exists after several years (and the esoteric name I've given it), good for me.
Similar situation for engineers, accountants and lawyers I know.
(I hate to say this, knowing full well you're likely in scope creep hell)
The only bonus features I'd personally need is a external reference library that tracks files on storage servers/external drives and a automated dynamic trend tags that tracks frequency, relevancy and associations data.
But even without that, it'd be well worth the time to adopt this structure.
I just gotta say, that TagStudio logo is *sleek*. Simple, but with a satisfying neon flair and literally dripping with originality to make it iconic.
I've been using Eagle for a year, it's amazing and has the best UI I've seen after trying many file management software options out there. I'm glad to have found a new competitor. Your project has potential, and I support it. I would suggest you open source your project, and let's work together to make this even better than Eagle. In the future, Tag Studio could have an even better UI than Eagle, with animations, smoothness, performance, a plugin system, and privacy.
Wish you all the luck!
He is on Python… performance will be tough lol
Mojo could give the project some more speed without much need for refactoring Code.
@@r3stless_82🔥
@@r3stless_82 Oooh baby, Every time I hear mojo🔥 come up, I get excited.
Since it's your own app I think that it's definitely worth it still developing it. Even if you find something else in some other app that works apparently better than yours you'll end up thinking the same conclusions you came up with by the end of this video, they're just not as custom as the way you want they are. So, I think that the best thing you can go for it's just "stealing" all ideas you will come across, rielaborate and keep developing them on your TagStudio, that it's just amazing. I believe this as I've been noticing that in every kind of organizations I've had for any system, whatever it was(notes, idea, photos, clothes, projects), I've always been through the same steps:
1. Starting with enthusiasm without any customization by my own, just the basics that it offers (taking notes without thinking twice)
2. Starting with customization using what it comes with (getting an app and diving into the program features, ex. Notability)
3. Bothering by its limitation (okay, it get the work done thought I've seen that other programs can do something else interesting too (ex. Goodnotes)
4. Starting customizing also that tool with my workflow (ex. Goodnotes + my workflow)
5. Getting aware that probably there's something already prepared by someone else and that could probably overtake what I've been doing (maybe my workflow isn't that special as I thought...)
6. Getting aware that what I did instead it's useful as it has showed me the full map of possibilities, and probably if I had to start over I would go through the same steps, however, this time I would be conscious.
These passages can be abstracted for any kind of activity I believe. Everything in the end will just collapse into the awareness that a good work won't ever stop getting better and better, though, we did our custom share, and the satisfaction from it is unrivalled.
Lastly, there's no comparison between the look and feel you can pull out from your efforts and someone else work, just think about color palette, yours it's marvelous man!
As someone who went through a similar journey into madness when looking for a bookmark organiser with a decent tagging system, I've never related more to a video.
I'm a graphic designer and video editor. I've reorganized my files twice in the last month alone. I cannot tell you how many duplicates of files I find all over the place when I start or finish a project for a client, or how many general assets that should be singular files end up in 5 different folders across 3 clients. Plus, things like music and sound effects are a pain because of how many different genres just one song could fall under, or how many different descriptors could be used to describe a sound effect. A wooshing sound that is a higher pitch than the others but also sounds comedic and shouldn't be used in a cinematic video ends up in a folder titled "Wooshes/Memes," my third "Wooshes" folder. If TagStudio ever supports audio files such as regular ole .mp3 files and .WAV files, along with .mp4 and .mov files, I will definitely pick it up as it would be a fantastic addition to my tools
What you've created is essentially an image board. Image boards have tags that apply to media, the tags are very hyperspecific to be as descriptive as possible, and often break into categories like artist, character and general (they don't affect the tags, it just makes it a little more readable), but tags also have aliases and implications. A tag alias would be like auburn_hair -> red_hair, so when you set auburn_hair, or search for it, it's automatically replaced with red_hair, but the former is so commonly searched that there's an alias. Implications are just auto-applied tags. If your image has a red_hair tag, then that obviously implies the character HAS hair, so hair would also automatically be applied. The files themselves are typically stored by their md5 or sha hash, while a database manages which tags are applied to which files. Image boards in general go by a "tag what you see" rule of thumb, that is, when you're tagging an image, you pick out every tiny detail that you can see in the image and you add it as a tag. There are also tag wikis which describe what the tag means, what implications and aliases are associated with it, and also similar tags. For example, for "Bowser_(Super Mario)", you might have King_Koopa aliased to it, might implicate the koopa species as well as the super mario franchise, and might list the koopalings and other major mario characters in the tag wiki.
What sets your program apart, though, is that image boards are usually a cloud-exclusive thing. This is the first time I've seen a local image board. If your program doesn't already have tag aliases and implications, you should consider adding them. It's rather simple, but saves a lot of effort, especially like with things you were agonizing about like one piece the anime vs one piece the manga. You could just have a one piece tag in the franchise/copyright tag category and then separate anime/manga tags such that a search for "one_piece color manga" would pull up an image you have that's from the one piece manga but in color.
I'd say just study image boards in general. Danbooru in particular. Their tag system is fancy as hell.
Like with your bulk tag adding thing you mention at the end, if you look at the way danbooru does tag editing, it just throws them all into a big textarea and you can type out all the tags one by one. They're space separated and the changes you make are quickly applied. When typing out part of a tag name, it'll give autocomplete suggestions so you're less prone to making a typo. Very simple and effective.
It should also be mentioned that the terminology is a bit confusing. There are forums like 4chan that also refer to themselves as "imageboards", and indeed that's what wikipedia defines an image board as. But the focus on *chan boards has always been first and foremost as a fast-paced internet forum, whereas the *booru boards I'm talking about are focused on archiving and categorizing media, and discussion on them pertains to said media. How best to organize it, or just talking in the comments about how this specific image is neat. In fact I'm pretty sure danbooru's source code is on github, which is why there are so many *booru boards. Do it, be the first FOSS local imageboard.
There is Hydrus Network, pretty much a local booru (or at least similar in the core behavior). I don't like its UI though, but it could definitely be an inspiration as per the general booru tagging system like you already explained.
Was about to comment, as they essentially made a booru :D
I personally use szurubooru for managing my content. But I get OPs struggle, cause I was looking through a lot as well, before settling on this (Probably not even half of the software they looked into is being shown in this video before deciding to write their own). Now 750k pictures later and plenty of automations I don't think I have the luxury to switch now any ways :D
Even tho I sometimes wish to, as szuru was not made for this kind of load. And with the repo-owner barely being active I kinda needed to optimize some stuff myself, so it runs better. But all in all, I'm happy with it, including the community projects and apps supporting it.
Other imageboards are fine and whatever but study e621. Its tagging is crystalline perfection.
@@4rumani 👁👁how would you know that
@@4rumaniwhy is it perfect
1. Great comparisons
2. Shows when to skip
3. Beautiful editing
4. AND gets something done?!
Subscribed 👏👏
This is genuinely the exact kind of app I’ve envisioned at night in bed when my mind is racing but I’m no where near good enough at programming to make it a reality. Please continue development and I’ll definitely purchase a copy.
First video of yours that I have watched and I love it. I love the style of the images in front of the continuous background and how you speak. Definitely watching more of your videos and I am going to stay tuned to find out more about Tag Studio
I haven't been this hype watching a video in a while. Every single issue and idea you had were literally mine it's crazy. But my mind was truly blown when I opened the comments and found that there's THOUSANDS OF US! How has there not been a software or many software that can do these things efficiently already. This is is so important.
PLEASE keep on this project. This is something I'll desperately need for the future, and Eagle doesn't sound super appealing to me atm. You really have the potential to be making one of, if not THE best file organizing system around.
dont you dare stop. i'd give you money if i had money to give
Most polite way to say you are poor 😂 [no offence]
I would pay if you'd let me. It's an idea as holy as winrar. simple. yet we can't live without it.
WORDDDD!!
I will happily pay!!! Please continue!!! 🙏🏆
Screw that, I will pay for this outright as long as it isn't a subscription! At least add a donation option if you put it out for free
Friend, what you are creating has SO MUCH value. I work on a lot of data governance initiatives. Microsoft (and other) solutions that classify (tag) and protect data are so customizable in the way you can define any attribute/key combinations you want - but implementing this is often incredibly cumbersome and complex. You’re relying strictly on Office or File Explorer to manage classifications or other attributes, and it’s not a fun experience if you’re working with LOTS of data. Especially when there’s data that, ya know… isn’t an Office file type or PDF 😂 I can think of SO MANY customers who would have benefited immensely from TagStudio. You’re trying to solve a personal problem, but you solved a HUGE enterprise problem and didn’t even know it. Your approach and process is what sets your solution apart from any other, you’re really onto something huge. I can’t wait for public release! Is there any way I can contribute or help you with this project?
PS- Eagle isn’t that great, so don’t let it discourage you 😂
What makes Eagle lacking? It seems like it's pretty polished, but I've never actually used it
@@Alexander-iz4hy the fact that it uses sidecar files and duplicates data by copying it to another location. for casual personal use maybe this is fine, at scale this is horrendous.
@@joelthearchitect Oh yeah that part of the video completely slipped my mind somehow; thank you
@@joelthearchitectyeah I was like “damn Eagle looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for! Lemme go downl-“ then he said that part and yeah absolutely not
I want to extend a huge thanks to you for developing this software. You've saved me from developing my own program from scratch. I absolutely love that you've open sourced it and that it just uses simple JSON files. This is a game changer for me. Thank you so much.
Finally, a personal Booru. How I've waited millennia for something like this to be made.
I don't know about you, but after watching your video I can clearly see multiple advantages TagStudio has over Eagle:
1. your tag system has far more capabilities than Eagle's. Subtags and aliases can be a deal breaker!
2. no use of sidecar files at all
3. simpler GUI
Wish you all the luck!
Also, Eagle seems to be much more of a resource hog if it has to DUPLICATE ALL OF YOUR FILES to make the sidecars work! An easier solution would be to have the sidecars separate but have data that links it to the original file and has the address stored and then have the sidecar address stored as metadata on the original image to secure the link.
@@jemm113This means it would half your capacity, or in other terms when buying a nas you would need drives twice as large! Aka burn way more money!
@@ericlotze7724You know you can just... Not keep both files? You can just have the eagle directory.
@@TunaIRL this wouldn't work with files that are part of a project, for example a web dev folder, video project folder etc, since it splits up the files into individual folders within the library folder.
@@godboat. Yes, it's not meant for that so of course it isn't optimized for that. It's meant as an easy way to organize digital assets. They wrote about why they made it a library, you can go read if you like.
Holy shit! A lot of programmers could really learn from you my dude. Not only do you take the time to make something extraordinary, but you take the time to share it in a format that is digestible to a real audience so that it’s not immediately lost in the abyss or left in the realm of obscurity. Hats off to you!
Also, the video quality is top notch.
The first thing I see missing right now is simply a better search.
Excluding tags is a big thing (for example, a query like "shrek -meme" leading to shrek-tagged content that isn't tagged meme or a subtag of meme)
But also more options:
What if I want one of two tags? I can't do an "or" search.
If we're talking feature creep, quality search is definitely a prime candidate to prioritize.
I actually cut out a section of the video I was originally was planning that specifically focused on search, talking about those exact things! I want a fully featured boolean search with "and", "or", "not", and the works for every piece of metadata and file attribute. Definitely a hefty feature, but it's absolutely necessary in my opinion!
@@cyanvoxel Yep, exactly! I actually had a note in my google keep to do that exact thing, except with a custom classifier system on top, so it could suggest tags. I had actually started in C#, but I hit a wall when I discovered ML.NET didn't allow for multi-label classification, and I had yet to restart from scratch. If your version is expandable, I'll actually probably just wait for the release and make a ML plugin.
@@cyanvoxel link to get it?
@@cyanvoxel Another great possible feature would be custom albums that are just something like search query inform of an album. Also being able to add the filetype in the search would be awesome. Defining the minimum/maximum leanghts of certain filetypes such as audio and video files could also add alot. For example I could be searching for "shrek, memes,
@@abhilashpatel6852 its not in the video description or a pinned comment, and he even said in the video that he's NOT releasing it yet
pay more attention
I do alot of little personal archiving projects, but stuff gets lost on hard drives ALL the time. This would be... incredible.
Please keep on developing this! Your tag and custom metadata system are soooo needed to organize huge amounts of (and different types of) files, which is something most other file org systems are not made for.
I am also very interested in the power of your search/filter/display features :)
I would definitely try the first release of this thing :D
I have been searching for such a file organization tool for YEARS.
On top of it, in recent months I've started sorting and backing up my extended family's photos and memories and I've ran into these exact problems when trying to find the most intuitive way to sort and tag different photos for future viewings.
I hope to someday use your organizer for these purposes, good luck in your journey!
Most Unix filesystems have something called "Extended file attributes" and NTFS has something called "Alternative File Streams". Both these features are a solution to the sidecar file problem and OSes use it to e.g. mark a file as downloaded from the internet. Even if you ended up with a Vault approach you could use it to add a unique id to files so name changes don't result in lost tags.
That's a much better idea that my hash comparison suggestion. But does this work cross-platform? Are those two interchangeable?
Windows supports Extended Attributes on NTFS, AFS is mostly just useful for unlimited length data: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes,
MacOS supports them on its file systems
linux has solid support: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes
@@rikwisselink-bijker I think they aren't really cross-platform; each file system probably has its own implementation, and also some don't support them (e.g FAT I think, and Windows displays a warning when data streams would be lost by copying between file systems).
@@cst1229 well, apparently I have to keep dreaming. Thanks anyway
I only use Windows, so I wrote my own NTFS file tagging software a while ago
Works really great, but NTFS only
Interestingly, I think you can hide massive files in tiny ones using NTFS... 😨
Im looking into swtiching to Linux and thought, "okay, how can i get this on Linux".
My eyes lit up when i heard QT!
For personal preference, I still really like GTK and how you can theme it, but thats a very good sign! Nice
One thing I've learned from watching your vids for the last two hours is your attention to detail to UI. And it looks like tag studio will trump eagle in that regard. Therefore, its tag studio for me
I DID THE EXACT SAME RESEARCH AND HAD THE EXACT SAME DESPAIR AS YOU. I'm so happy that your software seems to answer all of my need
Omg this is EXACTLY what I have been looking for for years. I was even planning on programming my own "Better Explorer" app because I couldn't find anything suitable, just like you. I hope you'll release your software to the public once you feel it's ready. Can't wait!
Granted there can be downsides, but if made into an Open Source Project you could collaborate and split up some of the work! Granted again downsides and all that, but worse case scenario it sits there and does nothing or someone forks it.
Best Case Scenario it gets made faster with less headaches, and insights from all sorts of people make it work better/have features one wouldn’t have thought of!
@@ericlotze7724It's already available on github
Your approach to facing a program that promises a similar approach to your own is the best one that you could take
Since its already a consolidated program with a userbase, it is as simple as making a google search to understand what the users are doing, how, and what are the pros and cons of the whole thing. It serves as material for a preemptive User Experience analysis.
Keep up the good work. Looking forward to that Obsidian integration
I haven't got very far into the video yet, but I just wanna mention Hydrus. It's basically like having a booru image board on your local machine. It's a tags first system that lets you define "siblings" (tag aliases) and "parents" (tags that imply other tags). A really handy tool that is often overlooked
Feels like he wouldnt have started this project if he knew about Hydrus
@@awsomebot1in his newest video he mentioned he didnt know about hydrus until posting this video.
You've solved what's been bothering me for the last 10 years... praise the author!!
DUDE, I literally have been brainstorming about that tags with tags system for 5 years already. Thank you so much for making it real.
Please don't stop working on your app. Great work as always!
It's funny how I was thinking about this exact same thing today morning while downloading some videos I wanted to link to my Obsidian - but not wanting to overpopulate my Vault with media files I won't really watch that much. I think I want to be like you when I grow up lol. Amazing editing, amazing idea and I know it's going to pay off!
I feel like you would really like Hydrus! It looks janky - sure, but it works really well and runs an SQL under the hood, so its really fast to use. A lot of features, and a lot of community support.
hydrus is the only way to go
So disappointed he didn't just start contributing to Hydrus...
This fantastic video is fun and informative, remember "good is good enough", waiting for never-ending perfection is pointless when you are overtaken by someone else. Consider doing more videos, you are an excellent candidate for more content videos.
Amazing!
I think it would be cool to add CLIP running locally as an automatic tagging solution also enabling features like “search similar”, but we are talking about only for photos and maybe videos but still useful I think.
This is the first project I have seen that I am genuinely interested in contributing to if it goes open source. I have never heard of Eagle, but I'm already starting to love your vision more.
It's available on Github
As a fellow mess I clicked from the title. But I stayed because you're an excellent presenter and the video was beautifully made.
As someone that is dealing with TB of data for images, videos, renders... The idea of DUPLICATING my files in eagle is nightmarish. TagStudio sounds perfect for my needs. Subscribed for updates!
The eye candy in this video is on a whole nother level! For real, top notch quality content right here
I came for the concept, I was entertained by the idea and I stayed for the humor and the memes (and also the existential crisis in the face of a own project)
Wow, i remember us having a brief exchange about eagle in your first community post. Love how the video turned out and that you highlight the absurdity of eagle's way of storing things in this video.
Haha! I remember you mentioning Eagle not too long after I'd become aware of it, but was still figuring out where I wanted to go with my project from there. That exchange definitely helped me think about things differently and gave me an overall more positive outlook on the project! Thanks for taking the time to comment, and sticking around to watch this one! 😁
your channel is basically guaranteed to succeed at this point. just don't leave the platform for half a year :D
Dear Mr. CyanVoxel, a program like yours is direly needed by many data hoarders such as my very own self. I personally do not appreciate the way Eagle is marketed, and the fact that it's supposed to be a 'reference library' means its development will likely have a narrow focus. I also strongly dislike the idea of duplicate files being created (some files can be 100+ GB).
A tagging program like yours, offline-only and with no privacy breaches and no side-cars would be a dream come true. I'm hoping that such a program would be able to identify any file renames that happens while the program is not running.
You've already made my Obsidian experience more enjoyable, hoping to continue seeing your workspace as it evolves. Cheers!
Stash, an organizer for pr0n fits the bill mostly with regards to offline focus and external metadata storage. Also handles file renames/ moves because it uses hashes
I love how you share your internal dialog throughout the process in all its darkness: doubt (am i going to get what i want) and compromise (should i rethink what i want, or ask for less). This makes me feel way less alone as i build my smb where every move, task and goal is basically a foray.
I've been struggling with tags and organization in my past, with Evernotes and hashtag plain text file and much more... until I no longer could keep up with it anymore. But it seems this is the holy grail of all tagging, and I hope to see it to full fruition. Also subscribed this channel, after seeing all the beautiful rendition, humor, and techie side that I can relate to.
God Damn it's been such a long time since I've watched something this High Quality on UA-cam I just know there was Huge efforts put in this video
You are making the solution of the future! Ive been frustrated with the file managing system for so long, and always wanted a tagging system, and your video sold me on the idea! I love the whole idea presentation. The editing and script was fantastic! you even compare to other apps not just to break down ideas, but show how they fall short compared to TagStudio. Sending much love, coffee and rubber duck sessions your way! ❤
I’m working hard to learn java and python and not once did I even think of creating my own File System! I’m thankful to all of your research, Kudos to you❤ hope to see you go far :)
Being frustrated by all the solutions already available out there is the biggest driving force to code a tool. I needed a fast and powerful image organization app myself and every 3rd party tool I've tried was a nuisance at best. I decided to develop my own and I basically abandoned the project now, because it already offers the functionality I needed. It is in the "press wrong thing at wrong time and it explodes" state but having deep understanding of the codebase allows me to avoid any issues. Been using it for my professional work for months and never had any problems with it. Being able to code your own workflow solutions that will perfectly match your mind is the best thing about being a programmer.
It's nice to see TagStudio pretty much aligning with my ideas as well. Centralized database for metadata storage and powerful tag system for navigation is exactly what I needed - no messy sidecar files, no embedded data that can be randomly destroyed by other apps. I will definitely check it out and use it as an inspiration for my own software. Nice work!
> no messy sidecar files
What's the problem with sidecar files? And if his program doesn't use sidecar files nor embed the data in the files, how does it work? It creates a database that links to the files' locations?
@@BakrAli10 That's what I would assume. I utilized a SQLite database for my application.
I'm technically implementing an image board with a database I can easily search through. My first implementation actually used metadata files, until I realized, that I'm basically implementing a database I want to search through using tags, so why not use an actual database engine instead of reinventing the wheel?
There is no reason why this data should be spread across thousands of files and reassembled in memory every time. I'm not implementing a file browser. I just have a "photo vault" containing all the data in a specified location and a database with metadata describing it. When I'm looking for files, I don't interact with the filesystem to parse directories or sidecar files, I query the database and get my response instantly. It's a specific solution for my specific problem and I'm quite happy with the result.
@@gumiennik7934
> There is no reason why this data should be spread across thousands of files and reassembled in memory every time.
yeah, that makes sense now that I think about it this way. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
@@gumiennik7934 what gui library/framework did you use?
@@bobsmithy3103 My app currently depends on raylib for drawing stuff but I'm in the process of implementing my own thing in OpenGL. Always wanted to learn basic graphics programming and this project was a perfect opportunity for an entry point into the GPU world.
"TagStudio" Immediately sounds like something I had on my mind a decade ago, a true "TagFS" file system. Amazing
It's always awesome to see projects evolving. Don't let just similar ones stop you - especially if their potential seems kinda wasted
I will try to not exaggerate but you are literally my hero. Please keep doing this.
This is my first time ever coming across this channel, and I am glad UA-cam recommended me this video. I used to have a similar problem in the past where I had way too many things saved (I still do) and it was near impossible to find the exact things that I needed. I did think of making a program myself, but I was far too lazy to do so. What you are making is the exact thing that I wanted, an app that can categorize files by tags and have the ability to search by filtering tags and / or extra (meta)data that I specify (such as title, description, etc). Of course, my idea was as simple as having multiple tags, but this is far greater than anything that I could have imagined.
I will also be honest about one thing. Eagle does seem like a solid alternative (and I'll have to admit that design-wise and feature-wise, it is spectacular), but like you said, it doesn't really cover what **you** need it for. Quite frankly, it doesn't cover what **I** need it for either. The fact that it stores copies of the pictures is a turnoff for me. Not only that, but moving files or renaming them has the side effect of possible disconnection from its data. If I were given a choice between Eagle and the program that you are making, I would 100% pick your program (and that is what I will do if you plan on making it public).
Finally, because this is your personal program, you have the liberty to customize it however you'd like, whether that means a different UI or functionality. If you plan on making it open-sourced as well, then in my eyes (and in most programmers' eyes), it will have won over Eagle by a landslide. Plus, if you plan on making it open-sourced, you have the open-sourced community helping you add features which will eventually surpass whatever "competition" you have.
Overall, amazing video and amazing product. I am amazed by how deeply you thought about the tagging system and how much effort was put into it. I cannot wait to see the finished result. Two questions though, are you planning on making it public, and if so, do you plan on making it a paid product, or a free open-sourced project?
Thats exactly what I've been searching for since forever! Wanted to do it myself as well, but the project seemed too daunting. Props to you for actually putting in the effort!
something very important, just for usability, would be the option to look through a tag tree as if it was a folder structure. like you could open the "media" tag and see first tags for "games" "anime" "manga" ect, and then the files only taged with media, not useful for finding specific things directly but very useful for seeing how stuff is actually linked together.
another very useful thing would be a tree showing what tags are tagged by other tags.
edit: also the ability to exclude tags from searches, just incase that was somehow missed. and the ability to set tags to be excluded by default without having to manually exclude them
i was having issues with using similar filenames a lot for my artwork and having isses with my organisation. i solved this by putting the month and day and what number drawing it was. i like my system. if i remember what month i did something, i can easily find it. if i can remember what year it was, though, less so, since i have to navigate between 12 different folders checking and double and triple checking....
im glad to hear about a new file organisation option. i dont think id use it because i dont really work by tags, but it sounds like its extremely useful for those that do.
the ending really summed up the entire video, i love ur editing style man!
As someone who tried to go down this road years ago when it came to trying to organize and sort the hundreds of hours of video and photos I came to the same frustrating conclusion. I eventually just landed on the acceptance that I will just have to have insanely good folder structure and organizing. If you made this available for Linux (all of my videos and photos are hosted on a self hosted server) this would be a game changer for me personally.
Aaaagh I came to the same conclusion too! My folders are now all hyperspecific but it takes forever to get anywhere and it doesn't help that Windows search takes 3-5 business days to find anything even on my NVMe SSD.
@@Carsian may I introduce you to voidtools' Everything search program? It indexes all the files on your system and allows instant search results. It is blazingly fast!
We seriously need this! Good luck on further development, I hope to see another vid on this in the future!
I feel like having a category for untagged files to be discoverable in that you can select multiple of the files to mass apply tags
This seems like a fantastic application idea for those of us who are very nitpicky, if you want more hands on the project, you can think about opensourcing it. I would absolutely like to help.
I definitely plan on open sourcing it once I continue it a bit more! I'm so glad that there's people interested in helping out
@@cyanvoxel @moonskined I too would love to help!!
@@kathryncook511It's been released on Github
I am amazed by how much effort went into this video. The production quality and subtle use of 3D assets are great!
I can't say how much I enjoyed watching this video. For so many reasons. First, I can completely empathize with everything you said. Each sigh, each "Oh, come on". I'm a mess. I thought about making a tagging system so many times (though I didn't actually start it - yet). To add one thing you apparently did not find: I used DevonThink when I still used a Mac. It does a lot of things really well (not having tagged tags, but at least a hierarchical approach that works well enough). It's not cross platform, so that's a bummer. And I think tags need to be an orthogonal mechanism, not part of an App that encapsulates data, even if it where open source or cross platform.
My personal approach to finding a solution for the mess is a bit different though. Tags are great, because they are simple and mostly unstructured. But then you start wanting meta information on tags (colors), meta information on tag assignments (when did I tag it, give the assignment a property I can edit, make a tag assignment a relation or relatable). And then things quickly get out of hand, as they always do.
Would love to have a chat with you about that...
But anyway, thanks for making this video, I absolutely loved it!
This software is the kind of software that i have been looking for years, kudos for the development and keep the spirit high until release, this software has so much potential.
Haha this has come full circle; I was just starting to work on my own tag-based file manager with a tag system very similar to yours, albeit as a PWA-adjacent design focused on image gallery display and good UX. It's good to see you're continuing with your own originality! I think I'll do the same too!
There's also a little tool which supports tagging (primarily for images) called Hydrus; a cool piece of kit but with the exact same critical downside of Eagle - duplicating files to keep them 'safe'.
If you're needing a tagging and management system to deal with an unworkable amount of data, chances are that data is quite bulky too. Duplicating 200GB+ of files? That's a preeeeetty big ask. As soon as you brought it up I was gonna give it a look but the fact it duplicates files is an immediate unworkable dealkiller.
If you avoid that problem, then you'd have the exact thing I've been looking for since forever, purely because it doesn't have that (and the other) mentioned downsides of things which do this already.
Edit: I didn't realize your channel was so small because of the high production quality of the video, lol. The presentation style and flair you've got going is excellent.
Yeah I was pretty surprised he did not talk about Hydrus Network.
They even both work as some Python code with a Qt front end, and is open source, free of charge.
I mean, you can just ask hydrus to delete the old files on import...
And if you just want to link to the files in obsidian, hydrus saves files in a very predictable manner(hash + hash folder) that you can easily copy. Or, like I do myself, you can use the hydrus api to dynamically display images in obsidian, based on the tags you want
@@Athrunen I find it unacceptable to delete my original files and completely remove original folder structure and filenames to conform to a new system. This is the opposite of keeping things interoperable. Hydrus also seems to only focus on a limited selection of file formats. You're probably not using Hydrus to organize your financial files, for example. We're being shown that this kind of re-organization ISN"T necessary here in this video.
loving your videos...really helpful
OPEN SOURCE THIS CRAP NOW, WE NEED IT
Maybe for me one important thing would be mobile support becouse i barely download images to my pc, but this project is incredible indeed
Honestly, I don't really care if he open sources it or not. If it's released in any way it'll be so sick
Can you help in any useful way or is supplying demands your only contribution?
I'd give $20 for a robust solution
@@MetalheadAndNerd i suggested open source because I'm interested in seeing the source and making changes if i see i can better some area, I'm not sure i will but many people could contribute and better the software if it reaches sufficient people
@@sortextheguy Usually people don't contribute but gladly take the code for their own products.
Thanks for this! This Project sits in my "things-to-do" list since like 10 years!
This is my favorite UA-cam video. Period. File organization, organization in general, this kind of thing is my JAM! My ADHD brain loves this kind of organization content. This project seems like such a time saver as well as an amazing way to remove stress from your life. I wonder how this project is going now, and I really hope that you will release a sequel. In the far far future, I wonder if you will expand this project beyond photos. :D
Something I learned from developing a few open source applications is to not get discouraged because someone did it first and maybe even better. If anything I find it encouraging, eventually getting close in features and then even doing some things better, or at least what feels better to me.
I think there is a very good reason many open source apps have acronym names starting with YA for yet another.
I haven't even watched the video yet and omg I've been doing the exact same thing, the past few months I been trying to rethink how to look for files and folders semantically, and the first couple things that came to mind were storing info in the file's metadata but then that just isn't good enough for videos where I wanna store transcriptions, vector data, links, and tags that are linked with other tags, so then my best option was to build a database where all the nots, tags, transcriptions for videos and all other stuff is stored on the database, along with a reference property that points to the file, but this is where I got a little lost, not knowing how to maintain this reference after the file is moved.
I feel like the folder structure is not good at all for finding things. The only use for folder structure is categorizing very distinct things on the surface, like maybe an archive folder, a school folder and a projects folder, but even then, I often forget whether the thing I want was a school project or a personal project, so going back and fourth through folders is just really time consuming.
I love your work, I found your channel 2 weeks ago and your Obsidian vault inspired me to work on mine, and this video couldn't reach me at a better time than now, the past week I've been building the file explorer and I've been hitting roadblocks, trying to rethink file management as a whole, and I bet I will find very invaluable information here.
Edit: I'm 8 minutes in, I fully understand and feel the exact same as you when it comes to picking out the existing solutions. They are just NOT GOOD ENOUGH for me LMAO
This is a really cool video. Instant subscribe. Love the storytelling, I was hooked till the end.
I have been in the same dilemma myself... The solution I'm considering is Immich because it has auto tagging ML features like Google photos but haven't implemented it yet. And I guess the ML requires a lot of GPU... IDK I haven't used it yet
If anyone has used Immich your feedback back will be greatly appreciated.
If you have other suggestions it will be great.
The thing I want...
- Cross Platform
- Good Auto Taging (Like google photos)
- Good UI/UX
- Works with various file types
- Extra point for opensource and/or free
ig tensorflow has light versions that can run locally
But open source is top priority for me, as i don't want program instantly going away... after years of saving files
also wanted to be fast and responsive (which is hard in a file manager)
Man, this is exactly how i envisioned the tagging system in my head, but i have up in my research for the applicable solution. Really glad this video has popped up in my recommendations
this has been on my mind for weeks. finally just found the time to start working on this idea, so I looked into it for a bit and the algorithm just gave me this video. i got the same feeling as you had with eagle but its ok since it was still in the idea phase. please release this!!!
The sidecar files approach seemed a good idea to not tamper the files and changing their checksum.
One of the issues that you mentioned (needing to move the sidecar file alongside the original file) would be solved using a FUSE filesystem.
TL;DR: FUSE is a filesystem that you can program yourself to do whatever you want whenever you open, modify, or delete any file. You could make one that moves de sidecar file alongside the original file itself. You can hide the sidecar file itself to avoid other programs to tamper with it.
I have seen a cross platform implementation, is called RClone, which basically mounts cloud storages (like mega, Dropbox, google drive), making it able to access all these files with any file explorer.
You can also mounts additional "layers", like a FUSE filesystem that encrypts all the files put in a folder (is what i use to encrypt all my files stored in Mega).
Though, the final approach you took looks good enough, is better having it done that daydreaming about a proper way but out of my skill boundary to do it😂.
Love the video.❤
Metadata isnt hashed with the contents
@@JaeTLDR1 huh? meta data is stored in the file format, its going to change the output of the hash.
Hey, I'm one of the creators of the Eagle videos you have mentioned towards the end there and just wanted to say.. what a journey! 😮 Great video. 👍
I remember myself being in the exact situation. Started brainstorming on how to make my own tagging solution and almost hired another developer to help me out with it as I am more of a web dev myself - only to find out about Eagle. 😅
Let me be clear here. I think that some still don't quite understand the benefits of the files being "duplicated" inside of an Eagle library. Once you import them, they will sit in their unique folder for the rest of their life unless you delete them. This is absolutely amazing as you can organize your file into multiple folders or add various tags inside of Eagle without ever changing the physical location of the file itself.
My library has more than 200.000 files and searching takes less than a second. The results are immediate every single time!
In a perfect world, file systems on Windows or Mac would behave just like the Eagle App, where moving a file from one location to another wouldn't unlink your files from Obsidian, DaVinci Resolve, etc. This would only be possible if the file itself kept track of its metadata like in which folders it is saved, what sorts of tags are added and so on without changing its root location. Eagle does all of this for you on top of your existing file system and the devs have promised to make the application open-source in case the company behind it goes bankrupt. Oh, and did I mention that it has a duplicate finder? There's a good chance you have many duplicates in your existing folders. If you import everything into Eagle, duplicates will only be saved once but still point to the folders these files where saved in previously.
Let's just say you had a large 10GB video in 5 folders for whatever reason. Inside of Eagle, it would still be in those 5 folders, but only take space for 10GB instead of 50GB.
On top of that, Eagle 4.0 comes with its own plugin system and all users are eagerly awaiting more devs to jump the ship to accelerate what this awesome piece of software can do already.
I have seen plugins from other devs for upscaling with AI, compression of files to different formats like webp straight from Eagle and a lot more.
There is an active discord group that people can join to talk to other devs and Eagle and I will soon publish more tutorials about the app and how I personally use it as a video creator.
Keep it up. Amazing quality content! ❤
Hey there Valentin, thanks so much for watching!! Your video is actually what helped me discover Eagle in the first place! 😁 I do think it's a great app and is probably perfect for what a lot of people are looking for (as is clear from your own testimony!), and also believe there's some confusion surrounding the internal structure from what I've seen people describe, as you only *need* a single copy of files inside your Eagle directory, and then Eagle obfuscates that so you don't really need to worry about where your files are being stored from that point on.
While this works just fine for organizing things that I would otherwise try to keep in my own folders, the deal breaker I have with Eagle is how this can break compatibility with other programs and *their* required file structures. Since I have a lot of programs (Blender, for example) that rely on existing file structures, or programs that require resources to be inside their *own* folder structure, I'm unable to use Eagle to tag and organize those files since it would involve breaking the required file structure. It's one of those things that's *so close* to working for me but just has that big caveat. (Unless Eagle is doing something *really* fancy with symlinks that I might be missing!)
I'm very pleased to hear that it's been working great for you though, and it's on my list of programs to recommend to people if it fits their use cases! All of the 4.0 features and plugin system is very exciting as well, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the program goes from here! Thanks again for taking the time to drop a comment!
HOW ARE YOU THIS TALENTED ??!!???
- obsidian ✅
- blender✅
- god tier editing ✅
- humor ✅
- making a insane software from scratch ✅
Damn.
Seems similar to spacedrive, which is trying to solve the whole OS agnostic/cross platform file system backed by a database tagging/metadata system. I dont think the tags go as in depth as what youre looking for but im watching that project closely, looks promising if it gets more stable
Damn I needed this 10 years ago.
well also the eagle thing is proprietary?
if the tagstudio is going to be open source I'm extremely interested in it.