Software for bridging gap between notes and digital media

Posted by Nomatica
Mar 6, 2020 at 09:12 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:

>Zoot now contains a help file.

Looks like the help file was updated recently. That is promising.

> I don’t know where they’ve gone, or why, but I suspect some
>have moved on because they require multi-platform support and a mobile
>companion app, neither of which Zoot can offer.

As I remember, email was a way that things could be made available- but it was preferable to use google.

>>>I use it for my media files, which can be individually annotated;
>>>and the Smart Folders options allow you to create custom views in ways
>>>that just tagging in other programs can’t.

I need to learn more about smart folders. I believe there was a post in this forum discussing it years back.

> Each photo is carefully named (who, where, when etc.). With
>a program such as The Brain, I have to define a structure and can then
>import (or link) the photo to a point in that structure. I.e., if I have
>a photo of person a in place b in year c, I have to choose where to
>place it, or place it in all of them, creating duplication. If I place
>it in one part of the structure, I can still tag it or search for it and
>find its relevance to other parts of the structure that way, but it’s
>inelegant and a lot of work.

It seems that my use case has many similarities. I have many photos, audio files and videos that I would like to catalogue based on the content, the people involved, and the people involved.
It might be that I can use a multi tier system. The issue with tagging using tagspaces, is the name length. The names get unwieldy. However if the files can be anchored so to speak (1st tier) with rudimentary tagging in the name, perhaps no more than 4 tag, then deeper connections can be added using Zoot’s database tagging. With your use case, is it possible to add detailed notes to the actual photograph? So for instance, would you be able to add a description within the photograph’s entry? Or do you need to create a separate entry, like a note, and link them? As I remember, Zoot had different types of entries. There were notes, Journal entries etc.

>
>Zoot, on the other hand, allows me to dump the whole lot into it without
>worrying about structure, links or tags. Using the smart folders
>feature, I can view all photo’s for person a, or all for place b, or all
>from year c, or any combination of them; and I can create new views
>without having to find, link, move, tag, duplicate etc. etc. the files.
> This sounds attractive. I do not want to be spending alot of time creating the structure. Can Zoot automatically monitor a file on your computer and import items from that file as separate entries? I realize a smart folder is different- I just am curious if that is possible. I typically save different files to different folders. It would be nice if my Info Manager could automatically import items into from a folder and create an entry. Even better would be going beyond the file name to create tags. In the case of an academic journal pdf/journal- pulling the tags from that. This seems to be something limited to reference managers.

If I remember correctly, Zoot can process emails in some interesting ways. There is a way that you can set it up to monitor an email account and have it create entries from incoming messages in a similar way to infoqube. Taking your current cataloguing project, would it be possible for you to create the same type of entry in zoot that you do currently, by emailing the photograph? Can you email a photo to an account you are monitoring, and have the name, location and event tags pulled from the attached file’s name or elsewhere in the email?

If anyone has experience doing this with infoqube or another application, I would be interested in hearing more.

Thank you for going over how you are using The Brain and Zoot. It is very helpful, especially because there are great similarities between what I am looking to do and what you are doing.