Add support for the tags in image name

[CavaleriOmar]

It would be possible to have a second support for tags, similar to that of TagSpace, for example:

nameimage[tag1 tag2].jpg

It is true that this type of tag does not support space in the name (at least in theory), but it allows you to use a tag, however fake, with any application that allows searching.

It might seem like something one can do for oneself by simply renaming the image, but when you use over a hundred tags you often don't remember them all or you can end up spelling it wrong sometimes (effectively rendering the tagging useless).

In practice, on the left and in the center you can see the name of the file from Aves, on the right you see how the tags are in TagSpaces

[deckerst]

Thanks for the suggestion, but it's not something I will support.

Aves is an opinionated product. One core principle is to favor the metadata standards available to image and video formats.

I understand the benefits that tags in file names do not depend on formats and are available to generic file browsers, but for many reasons this is an inferior solution compared to standard metadata tags. These standards are not vendor specific. Most desktop photo viewer/managers already know how to process them, and it's about time the mobile world catches up.

The real question is: why would you search tags in file names, when you can search them in a semantically stronger way with Aves and other metadata-aware software?

[sourcevault]

I have run into a practical problem with this. How should I tag all possible different types of files - .jpg, .pdfs, .mp3, .amr, .mp4, etc. The filename based system used by tagspace - with all it's limitations and drawbacks - seems to work for now atleast. Sometimes, getting something is better than getting nothing. Aves would work really nicely with tagspaces if it was possible to incorporate filename based tagging.

The real question is: why would you search tags in file names, when you can search them in a semantically stronger way with Aves and other metadata-aware software?

I agree 💯, but given how there is no universal method of tagging any filetype, how would you go about convincing everybody to adopt the same standard ? even among image files there is no universal standard - for example no tagging app on desktop does integration with aves. The shortest and simplest method to go about this is the filename method. The worst outcome is not a sub-optimal tagging standard, but no tagging as all.

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Here is some personal statistics:

• I took around ~ 2000 images in 2024.
• I have around 30 tags ( across images, videos, pdfs, audios ( self recording and call recording ).
• some of my images are associated (via tags) to .mp3 files and pdfs.

It's dead simple, but how powerful is this system really ? well lets see, with 30 tags and 4 tags each. A file can be IDed in 27,405 different ways.

If I am creating 2000 personal images and files / yearly. In 30 years I would have 60,000 images, a lifetime worth of memories. would 30 simple filename based tags be enough to search through my lifetime ? of course ! by just using 2 tags, you can narrow down to 137 files.

Nobody has the time to look through 137 files, so lets assume that any search should ideally narrow down to just ~ 10 files. If you add a third tag to your search, you only need to look through 14 files.

For personal files, this is quite good, even for small business owner with 10-15 employees this is quite good.

Better semantic search would be nice, but its way more important to get people off the big apps like google photos and make them use something like Aves and tagspaces for their images and files.

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I have written more about this issue here :

OneFolderApp/OneFolder#96 (comment)

The main competition or comparison is not between the different open source projects, but against google and apple cloud based system, it would be nice if all these open source projects worked together 👍 .