Tags Discussion - Support system wide tagging across all Official Nextcloud apps

See this Nextcloud server request of tagging across all apps. Could make an excellent compliment to recently announced Projects functionality in Nextcloud 16 + the automation of workflows via tagging that will be available in Nextcloud 18.

Direct quote from the Github request for system wide tags across all apps:

I would like to be consistent:

  • Have tags everywhere, thus allowing to have many tags for one object
  • Tags list being shared between apps.

Additional context

  • This will allow a consistent taxonomy on your objects (tasks, bookmarks, …)
  • This will induce a capability to find all objects related to a tag.

Example:
I use the tag recipe to track my recipes, and the tag cooking for the things to try in the kitchen
I have a pdf of a recipe, which I tag with cooking and recipe
I pasted another recipe in a note, which I only tag recipe because I already did it with my mother last week.
I bookmarked a third recipe, and tag it with cooking and recipe
I uploaded a photo of a recipe from a book taken during a trip in Italy, which I tag with cooking and recipe
I create a task Schedule invitations for cooking tag which I tag with cooking

We may then envision to have a global tag search, so that if I search for tag cooking , it will show me all the objects tagged with it (files, photos, tasks, bookmarks, notes).

5 Likes

Sounds good to me.
I’m wondering if the just-arrived Projects feature is becoming obsolete then already.

Interesting idea!
What would be the differences to Projects?

System wide tagging does not yet integrate across the core apps. So, this concept has made nothing obsolete. It is just a discussion. :slight_smile:

If it exists, it could work nicely as a way to add and remove things from projects. Projects are for grouping files & app functionality like talk discussions. Hopefully, they will all integrate together eventually.

Beyond the technicalities, I imagine project as bags that can contain all I need for a short period. They differ from the directories which are like wardrobes: the objects in there should be more static and more ordered.

Tags are like labels: useful for a categorization.

I imagine that I’d open a project to look what is inside.
I imagine also that I’d look at an object (file, contact, …) and see which characteristics it has by looking at the tags

1 Like

Still thinking about this…

I find myself needing system wide context
and project specific context.
To-Do will mean something different when applied to:

  • Doug’s Nextcloud account
  • ProjectX, which Doug is working on

I suppose I’m looking for characteristics based on tags to help me sort through items which might be related. Nothing is integrated, but I find myself having hundreds or thousands of:

  • Bookmarks with folders, tags, and descriptions.

  • Notes in plain text and markdown, sorted into sub-folders. Tags can be added from the file system, but aren’t rendered within the app. See github request on attaching notes to any app, attaching a note to a “project”.

  • Contacts allow markdown description fields, but these cannot be accessed from the Notes app.

  • Deck allows markdown description fields, but these cannot be accessed from other apps.

  • Let's Talk about Projects - still in the early days of integration as we’ve mentioned previously in this Tag discussion thread above.

  • Dashboard is releasing contextual views for projects, but I’ve found no benefit to the dashboard because I already have RSS, which is extremely robust and mature when using services such as FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny, or Miniflux. One could even setup a carefully configured desktop and mobile RSS client for this same level of functionality while syncing their configurations via Files.

    • It doesn’t make sense for me to use the Dashboard when I just want to jump directly into the Files app itself, having already seen info from Activity, Bookmarks, News apps in my RSS reader or Nextcloud Notifications.
  • Groups and Circles for sharing projects with the caveats detailed in Circles or Groups

  • Dummy users created solely for managing projects. Group Folders app has proven too unreliable, so I don’t bother with it.

System wide tagging as a universal standard for apps to deploy would be really helpful in allowing greater interoperability between these apps. Just a complex, whimsical pipe dream, so thanks for reading. Too much information for me to describe it any further above. :+1:

2 Likes

I agree that system-wide tagging could be the righ way to properly integrate all of the installed apps. I have been searching for years of a way to group files, notes, bookmarks, passwords and emails in specific containers related to a project.
I took a look to the project feature itself, but it seems to me very limited (we don’t even have a tab to display all the projects toghether and enter in the one we need). I could see that with some work the project feature can be useful, but I don’t even find the repository to try to help.
I think that both projects and universal tagging could be useful in different ways: as @just says some objects (files, notes, tasks, bookmarks…) could be related without me needing them grouped, so a tag can be an economic way of keeping track of such relation. When I want to group only some objects, independently of their context (tag) I could use a project.

This is related: Better integration of different services.

1 Like

I don’t know whether this is because people posted new threads about it, but since this suggested topic was perfectly spot on, I have no reason to create a new one.

I’m really a lot in favor of system wide tagging! And especially for the main apps.
I don’t understand how come tags in Tasks are not the same as Tags in Decks and Tags in Notes.

Imho, it should be possible to tag anything in a unified way, without relying on automated indexing (which is a nice to have too, that’s not the point).

Also, the cherry on the cake would be to be able to link anything with anything.
So far, this is very limited sometimes. In some cases, you can link cards, or event, in some others you can add a colored label (Quick Notes)…

Even the Recognize app and Face Detection don’t have the same tagging principles. It’s a mess.

So I’m curious to understand why so few people are in this topic… Am I missing something?

Thanks.

Best,

1 Like

With projects deprecation in nc25 I do not believe this is still possible. If that is the case, it has me wondering if:

  • Projects is too difficult to maintain
  • the nature of connecting apps together is too difficult to implement, even apart from tagging.

My .02

Certainly would be nice. Agreed that the two provide different, if sometimes complementing, usecases.

Projects are being replaced with “Related resources”, which work automatically and don’t have an unified page to control the groups. It seems to me that this is the right time to push for manual grouping through tags, or to at least let the user manually manage those “relations”.

1 Like

Here is the discussion thread which led to the idea of related resources.