To make it easy to see the most popular, please post a single option per comment. Upvote the ones you like. I’d love to know which are the best.
Dolphin File Manager: Dolphin is the default file manager of the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment and offers a built-in file tagging feature. You can tag files into categories irrespective of their location, which gives you a new way to organize your files.
Note that the tag functionality only works if you also use Baloo, their file indexer.
Tocc: Tocc is a tag-based file management system for Linux. It provides a more flexible way of classifying files than traditional file systems based on a tree of files and directories. Tocc includes a tag-based file system called Toccfs, which turns directories into tags and searches your files for you. The goal of Tocc is to provide a better system for classifying files, which is more flexible than classic file systems based on a tree of files and directories. Tocc is free software and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.
TMSU: TMSU is a command-line tool for tagging your files. It provides a simple command-line utility for applying tags and a virtual filesystem to give you a tag-based view of your files. TMSU is suitable for users who are comfortable working in the terminal.
I’ve been using tmsu for years to manage thousands of pdfs and images for my academic research.
This is my choice.
For documents: https://docspell.org/
If cross-platform compatibility is important for you, then filetags is a solid choice.
Filetags: Filetags is another tag-based file manager for Linux that allows you to manage simple tags within file names. It is a Python-based tool that provides support for controlled vocabularies. When invoked for interactive tagging, it looks for files named .filetags in the current working directory and its parent directories as well. The first file of this name found is read in. Each line represents one tag. Those tags are used for tag completion. With tags within .filetags, you don’t have to type the same tags over and over again.
Supertag: Supertag is a tag-based filesystem written in Rust for Linux and macOS. It provides a tag-based view of your files by removing the distinction between directories and tags. Supertag is still in development and may not be suitable for all use cases.
I was going to make a joke along the lines of tag based filesystems, but I guess it’ll be reality now? I would actually love to try an OS that integrates well with that.
Unfortunately the project seems dead since 2021
For media files: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html
What features do you expect from a tag based file manager?
I ask because Emacs Dired might qualify. It allows you to apply arbitrary “marks” to files, each mark is a single character. Some characters have special meaning, e.g. “
D” means ready for deletion, and “*” is the default mark (not for deletion). You can then preform batch operations on marks, for example using marked files as arguments to a shell command.However, without additional extensions, marks are not persisted between sessions, there is no virtual filesystem, and no search function for listing all files across multiple separate directories that match particular tags.
One such extension is filetags.el which is an Emacs UI inspired by the filetags file manager (which someone else already mentioned).
Tagsistant: Tagsistant is a tag-based filesystem for Linux that turns directories into tags and searches your files for you. It allows you to create tags, tag files, and search for files based on tags.
TagSpaces: TagSpaces is a privacy-aware file manager with tagging and note-taking capabilities. It offers a consistent user experience for organizing and annotating files across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android platforms. It allows you to add tags and descriptions to files and folders, making it easier to search and organize your data.
It’s paid and in my experience on Android the indexing is terrible
It’s open source so it’s not paid. It has a pro version with extra features.
The open source version hasn’t been updated in a long time, the paid version is the only one being maintained. It used to be open source.
