Looking for a "front-end" to manage offline content

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Posted by Donovan
Dec 8, 2018 at 02:11 AM

I answered a question recently in a thread where I actually misunderstood the OP’s need and realized I responded with an answer in need of a question. With that in mind…

I use Windows as my primary operating system.

We all have hoarded more and more data offline in various media that requires either very organized folders or a very fast search making sure that keywords/tags are always perfect. Dealing with all this is a bane to my offline computer existence. I am looking for a “front-end” (for lack of a better word) or “dashboard” that would allow me to organize my content wherever it might be on my computer - partitions, other drives, etc. and be presented to me in a slick graphical UI. I can imagine all kinds of possibilities baked into the program - visual previews of document, movie, audio, pdf, and image files. The actual files could live anywhere on my system and the program would only bring the titles, type of file, etc. to be displayed in an orderly fashion. This could be project-based or recognize everything and manually sort them to projects. I can imagine notes in a block that describe what’s in this or that collection. Then clicking on that block and seeing files related to the subject - no matter what or where they are. Again, documents, image files, movie files, whatever. The ultimate purpose would be to pull together all, or selected, content to the front-end program that would allow for organization of projects or collections.

I feel like I have not done a very good job of explaining what I am imagining. This is one of those times when I am going to wish I could go back and edit the post to make certain things clearer that could convey exactly what I’m looking for. Does anything like the above exist? Don’t say the folder structure of the OS, because it has limitations in sorting content, preview abilities. among other things. This would allow the pulling together of all files, not with only written content as in an outliner, but with all of the various media and file types we deal with. I hope I have described enough to trigger a suggestion from somebody. I’ll try to answer any questions as I see them and help further narrow exactly what it is I’m hoping to find.

As always, thanks in advance… what a great resource outlinersoftware.com has been to me.
Donovan

Posted by Franz Grieser
Dec 8, 2018 at 09:41 AM

Hi Donovan.

The thing that comes to mind on Windows is Tagspaces (https://www.tagspaces.org/). It is file and folder-based but uses tags so you can lay your own structure over it.
I don’t know whether you can preview your files but you can open documents using the application registered for the file type.

I do not use Tagspaces, though I will look into it next year. Someone on this forum mentioned Tagspaces a few weeks ago, maybe he or she can tell you more about it.

Posted by Donovan
Dec 10, 2018 at 03:05 AM

Really surprised at what you can do with TagSpaces. Not exactly what I was looking for - but - what a great find! If there’s been much discussion here, I guess I breezed right by.

Posted by Hugh
Dec 10, 2018 at 08:55 AM

I became interested in TagSpaces because I use Finder Tags extensively in my (Mac) file system and there remain very few actually useful file-tagging applications available for macOS. I found that, unfortunately for my use, TagSpaces doesn’t “inter-operate” with Finder Tags. (It occurs to me as I write that I could probably try to make it do so with Hazel.)

Posted by fishejim
Dec 10, 2018 at 02:33 PM

Another option might be a library management tool. I’ve used https://calibre-ebook.com/ to great success in the past. It is listed as an e-book reader, but it provides a library of any files you add to its catalog. It is easy to add tags, comments, and other information. I think Zotero is an alternative.

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