Topic: approach for fast detecting of file move and copy
Hi, Andrei, great app.:)
I have a few suggestions for your software concerning detecting file move and copy. My approach is as follows
1. Let a file with tag to have a special name, e.g. ***..ext (ext can be pdf/doc etc.). In most cases, this is acceptable, especially for personal knowledge management (PKM), where only important files are tagged. Alternatively, we have to setup complex rules to include important files and to rule out non-important files. I wish you can give a special option for this feature. As will be seen, when combined with everything SDK/IPC, this leads to superb speed.
2. embed tag info into the file, using Alternate Data Stream (ADS), you can refer to a software called HobComment, its author, Dr. Holb successfully parses the summaryinformation. I think it is easier to simply use a specific ADS, for example, filename.ext:tag.txt to store tag information.
3. When combined with a file search engine (such as everything), we can gather tags of the ..ext files quite quickly. For example, whenever Frog is activated, it will automatically find all **...ext files, identify new files and then read their :tag.txt stream to update the tag database. Obsolete files can also be removed.
4. The problem with ADS is that, if files are zipped or copied to a FAT partition, ADS information is lost. So an additional database update mechanism is preferred. You may give users a button to store such tag inside the file (seems it is already planned), and allow users to specify some rules, for example, use specific metadata in the file to construct the tag (see also the question at the end of the post please). Both Office documents and pdf documents have internal metadata, and we can
use special format to make parsing easier. But to get and parse such data is slower than using ADS. So this function is often used for a small group of files which are often manually selected by the user. Of couse, if ..ext is used, a batch updating is also quick. If a file already has :tag.txt, it is normally not necessary to extract and parse the metadata.
5. Many user prefer to edit metadata within other editors, so it is better to provide a shortcut to perform the tag update seamlessly. A easy and flexible approach is using AutoHotkey, and one may ask help here or in the AutoHotkey forum.
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A question, when i drag and drop a file to TF, I saw a menu item "import keywords from meta information". However I tried a file with keywords, and did not see how it works.
Last edited by jabobian (2010-05-02 11:21:51)
