Hierarchical Tagging / Auto Tagging

🍱 Features & apps App ideas
1

Sometimes when I need to tag a file, I wish it could tag some related tag for me. Consider the following example:

  • Food
    • Fruit
      • Apple
        • Fuji apple
        • Green apple
      • Banana
    • Vegetable
      • Carrot

So let’s say I tagged a file with tag Green apple. With the current tagging system, I would not be able to find the file with a more general tag like Apple, Fruit or Food.

(Q: Why don’t you just tag green and apple separately?
(A: Because when I want to find a green carrot I don’t want it to return me a green apple with a normal carrot!
(Anyway, I digressed…

I noticed the Files Automated Tagging App may do the work (by using rules which check other tags), but currently it only applies tags when files are newly uploaded. It does not work when I try adding new tags to a file, and reuploading the file won’t help either.

I also noticed in one of the respond to a issue in Files Automated Tagging App, there seems to be a plan to add a console command to apply auto tagging rules to existing files. I first thought that may work for me, but after realizing sometimes someone may use Carrot to name their rabbit, so I would like the auto tagging happens when the I tag the file, and allow me to remove the auto added tag manually that case…

Is there a plan to add such functionality to the tagging app?

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2

I absolutely second the suggestion to offer hierarchical tags.
Those tags are such a powerful tool to organize content!

The issue is: one only understands with experience and time passed how powerful that actually is. I am using such tags in digikam for my photo collection. the ability to quickly filter down a huge collection to a few hits by those tags is incredible.

I held some talks at open source conferences about this many years ago. Unfortunately I learned that most people reject the idea of hierarchical tags. The main objection is complexity. Those people fail to understand that this is nor actually the case if you do not expect everyone to build up a separate hierarchy, but if you offer a shared ontology people agree on. That makes tag clouds mergable! Even over language borders!

I would love to see that becoming reality If only people would understand the power and charm of that approach…

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