Pardon me if I missed it from readme.md

Basically a way of viewing media inside the program. Opening them in full window (not exactly fullscreen) and having some buttons to control what's shown - next file, previous file, start slideshow, open random file etc.
It can also have keyboard shortcuts for some actions.

As title says. Currently files like shortcuts (lnk files) and music tracker files aren't visible and I'd love to be able to tag my software with tags like "utility" and "game" and whatnot, at least without having some sort of strange workaround.

I believe it’s not supposed to look like this normally. I’m not sure if I caused the error myself…

In the image below, you can see that the empty fields are not loading correctly, this also happened when there was nothing in the library. Maybe it’s an idea not to display them, then if the whole area is empty, you could display a specific text like ‘please open a library’ or something like that.

Or: Ctrl-C

The program doesn't appear to be responsive to it when running it in console and debugging, adding a signal trap handler to trigger program exit would help with that

REcently I reset my windows system and started fresh. This always brings new possiblities to try other/new things and there's nothing newer than an alpha project which just released. Anyways, I'm currently in the process of using TagStudio as my main form of storing and searching for files, but I've come over an "inconvenience". A very minor one at that, however I still got this idea from it:

"Conditional Statements" would be a system where you can specify what should happen to an entry if it has a certain tag. The main point, imo, would be to remove certain entries from being viewed, except if you explicitly search for them. The reasoning for this is, I have a few files that I don't want people to see when I'd stream or similar. I tagged them with "Personal" and it would be really cool if it were possible to hide such entries.

This might sound very insignificant... and probably is, but I'm sure one could extend that system to also have other abilities which I could not have imagined.

In order for this program to be powerful for browsing audio samples in particular. One should be able to see the waveform preview and click on a part of the wave form to hear a preview.

(The video I have attached is of FL Studio's built in file explorer, but this feature is standard in Ableton and many other DAW's and video editing software.)

Every time I Shift+Click on the waveform, it plays the file from where i just clicked.

I like to search through sample library's, and many of them are completely unorganized and have 8+ samples stored in each audio file. So I don't really know what's in the file until I've opened it up and listened to the whole thing, which is a headache on windows file explorer, because you need to open up VLC or media player to listen to it.

Recently I have been experimenting with using alternative DAW's for an alternative workflow experience, but using file explorer for browsing samples sucks. So I just end up having FL Studio open anyway, which defeats the purpose of trying to take a break from FL Studio.

The ability to tag and browse samples and preview specific sections of them would be incredibly powerful for any musician and video editor.

Hi,
I think it would be useful if you added a cancel button in the "Refreshing Directories" Window, that pops up after creating a new Library. Because at this point of time a miss selection of a whole drive as a new Library, can't be canceled (at least i have not found a way to do it) and it would be tedious to restart the whole application. Iit would also be an option to add this functionality to the closing button of the popup.

example image

When you open a directory in Application and create a new library it adds the files but when you try to refresh it adds them on top of the old files.

After one refresh and a new file between adding and refreshing:

After another refresh:

As you can see the old files are not clearing.

System Details

System: Windows 10 22H2
TagStudio Version: ff488da

Describe the Problem

When removing a tag field that contains either a "Favorite" tag or "Archived" tag from an entry, its respective icon badge over its library thumbnail is not updated.

Steps to Reproduce

Same as above.

It probably is only on linux but i'd still like to mention it.
Linux works fine just need a boot script into virtual environment.

there's a boot issue that i'm not sure is only a linux thing or also in windows.:
it looks like this first time i booted it up is that normal:

otherwise if it's not I'd not mind writing bootup script for linux.
And the UI 'glitch' if it's not suposed to look like that. minding that it only does it until files are added

When Library.refresh_dir is called and one file in the searched files exceeds the MAX_PATH length(256 chars) the programm throws a FileNotFoundError. You could circumvent this by checking the path length of every path or you catch the exception and discard the refresh. This all happens while you sort the files that are not in the library, in library.py in line 982-983. This is really an edge case but can happen when long File names and nested Folders are used. I don't know if you can repreduce this error because as far as i now you are asked by the python installer if you wan't to disable this limit(this is not selected by default I think). I ran into this issue while exploring what would happen if i selected my C: drive, maybe this helps to repruduce this bug.

Let's say you have tag "atsuko kagari" and "akko", both are the same character, but one is a nickname for the other. You've tagged some files with Akko and some others with the full name, but finally want to merge them together under a single tag.

akko can become an alias for the full name, but then all existing files with that tag need to be processed with the following:

• add the new tag
• remove the old tag
• add all parent-child relationships from the old tag to the new one
• remove all parent-child relationships from the old one

doing this with a single modal would be helpful :)

System Details

System: Windows 10 22H2
TagStudio Version: ff488da

Describe the Problem

By multi-editing multiple library entries that have asymmetrical fields (ex. one entry has [tag_field, text_line] and another has just a matching [text_line], if the [text_line] were to be edited, the program will try to store the data in the same field index for both, causing the library to corrupt.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create any "tag" field on an empty entry. Then create a title field, call it “test”.
2. Create title on a second empty entry, also call it “test”.
3. Select both entries, from second to first.
4. Edit title field, call it “test2”.
5. Produces the error, with errors persisting when trying to browse the library.
   In addition, by creating a different "text line" field in place of the "tag" field, you can visualize how the incorrect field for the first entry is modified with the new string data.

TagStudio should enable direct folder tagging, enhancing its functionality significantly. This feature would enhance compatibility with project-centric environments such as Unity and Android Studio, where various files and subfolders need to be grouped yet might include junk files that don't require tagging.

This functionality could be implemented by introducing a .tsignore file within folders. The file would serve both as a marker for TagStudio to recognize the folder as taggable and as a mechanism for users to specify which contents should be ignored (like .gitignore). This approach would allow users to find projects and resources used in the projects that could be useful elsewhere

PDFs and SVGs are the ones I'd like to see the most, but I'm sure there are a lot of others.
preview-generator looks like it might be a good solution.
It looks like it has built in support for thumbnail caching too, so 2 birds with 1 stone.

The current implementation assumes the file manager is Nautilus. As a Linux fallback we can use "xdg-open" passing in the parent folder for the file in question, this won't select the file but it will open the folder the file is located in, in a file manager agnostic way. It looks like KDE Dolphin supports the "--select" option so we can add support for that too.
Also I recommend changing the tooltip from "open in explorer" to "open in file manager" or "open in file browser" so the language is platform agnostic.

the ts_qt.py file contains most if not all of the code for running TagStudio at this point, as new features are added this is causing this file to continue to grow and make things harder to find, edit and maintain.

I think breaking out the widgets and modals would be a good start on this

a barebones example would be the Preview Panel

This widget is almost 700 lines long and has only been edited about 6 times with minor changes but the ts_qt.py file appears in almost half of the commits to the project so far.

Happy to start working on a PR for this but want there to be a little more feedback than my own thoughts.

The Add Tag and Add Subtag windows are empty untill you enter a searchterm into the searchbox. It would be nice if they just showed every tag instead so you can add tags/subtags with only the mouse.

I'm seeing a lot of people in the discord asking for help with installation instructions, I think we should have a simple easy_run.bat script or the likes that would;

1. Check the installed python version(s), pick a compatible one, or;

• Install a compatible python version (maybe after "press Y to install python")

2. Create a venv, and install dependencies inside of it, or just verify its there
3. Launch the program

This script could be hailed with a CMD ./easy_run.bat, or a double-click.

This script should be entirely temporary to the alpha stage and should be removed once we start doing packaged releases (releases with .exe binaries/installs bundled with them).

The current JSON schema used takes up a fair amount of space for JSON data, and can take some time to process a large number of files. As well, it is prone to write corruption. SQLite will help both space and performance concerns, and we can do further mitigations to avoid the mentioned corruption.

i don't know enough about the details of how tagstudio works to know how easy this would be, but the ability to make custom fields is a thing i've seen before and i think it'd be nice to have

essentially just the ability to make your own fields and give them their own type (text/number/date/list/etc)

I had the idea that there is still the normal folder tree view and that this is simply taken from the existing structure of the explorer from which the files come.
so you could also have automatic tags added based on the base folders.
or also the possibility that you can display the files again in the explorer etc
the other possibilities are, I think, limitless.

the idea would be to put it on the left side as a panel that you can easily hide at any time

watchdog looks like it might a good solution. I think this should be an optional setting, but probably on by default.

Currently, it's possible to bulk add fields, like the actual Tag attribute to all selected items, however it is impossible to add the tags themselves. Currently having to go 1 by one in order to tag items.

.vscode is already in the .gitignore. If you would like to keep the folder, you should remove line .vscode from your .gitignore.

I managed to build & run on macOS so I'm sharing:

It didn't work with the latest version of python, something related to dependencies, but 3.10 works so try with that.
I recommend using mise for installation of python, it can also handle the rest of the build. Using mise, this is how you build on macOS (and potentially linux)

Put this into a file called .mise.toml in the project directory

[tools]
python = "3.10"

[env]
_.python.venv = { path = ".venv", create = true }

[tasks.tagstudio]
run = "pip install -r requirements.txt && python tagstudio/tagstudio.py"

and then run (with installed mise) mise trust && mise install, this will install python and create the venv and you can run the normal linux/ macos build instruction, or alternatively use mise run --yes tagstudio one-liner

the app & gui starts but looks a little fucky

when adding a tag to an image and not searching for a tag explicitly, no tags are shown at all, i feel like it would be a cool idea to list all tags made by default into the Tag search with the scroll bar(depending on the amount of tags there is) and just secluding tags that dont fit the search anymore. (i hope that makes sense haha)

For Example if there are multiple users, they might have TagStudio installed for all of the users, or some may have opted out, but they still would want to access the files in the library in an organized way

Also an option: automatically create windows library for TagStudio that includes the folders of the main libraries(i.e. music, documents, photos and etc.)

I had the idea earlier that you have a list or overview to display all available tags.
and at the end also the connections of the nested tags

If you want to take it to the extreme, you can even display the whole thing visually in a kind of graphic.

dupeGuru last released a version in July 2022, and its functionality has not advanced in some years. Czkawka last released a version in February 2024 and is being actively developed, with many features that dupeGuru lacks entirely. Czkawka also currently (as of 2024-04-23) has ~200 more forks and ~13000 more stars than dupeGuru, so it appears the community is much larger around Czkawka.

I think it would be better to focus on Czkawka for any future integration or features surrounding duplicate files.

Suggestion:
Make it so that if you press ctrl+shift, you'll be able to select in between your previous item selected, and the next item selected WHILE still keeping the items you previously selected.
Currently, doing CTRL + SHIFT + click cancels all the previously selected and selects the item you clicked.
Adding this suggestion would help make selection even more convient

Sorta like a .gitignore, to be able to ignore folder patterns like (ironically) .git, cache folders, and .DS_Store and the likes.

Else all the hundreds or so hidden files will clog up the interface, with no way to hide them.

Switching between a list/column view and the current grid view could be useful for users that want to use this for text/binary file organization instead of images

Heya, it's me again;
I created a small .exe file that simply executes the start_win.bat file via the system call start start_win.bat.
This is the whole C-Code I used to create the .exe:

#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void) {
    system("start hide_bat.vbs");
    return 0;
}

I also then used Resource Hacker to change the icon to the tagstudio\resources\icon.ico provided by the source-code.
The code, exe and vbs file(s) are provided here.

It would be nice if one could find a file in TagStudio and then drag it towards a new destination, such as a file explorer, a website drop area or a chatroom.

Tag Studio is nice but kind of unusable when you have a lot of different file types (like zip files, pdfs, text files etc.) among your pictures in the same folders. It makes your library look like this everywhere, where it is really difficult to find what you are actually looking for:

So it would be nice if it were possible to sort or group the files by their file type. As an example of how this could work is the Windows file explorer, which has both of these. What I could imagine would be buttons at the top of Tag Studio similar to this:

which would sort the files in your library or group them under headings depending on their file type, like in the windows explorer

First: I don't have a full grasp as how two tags are implemented, so this may not be an option.

Can this issue be solved by creating a checksum based off the file and/or providing the file a hidden tag / database ID number, which would then continue with the file? The idea would be this number is unique, and can then be found later on if the file was previously in Tag Studio but later removed.

For example, if I took file cat.png, after it was already in Tag Studio and it was given ID: 1, then I removed it from my computer and later added that same file that had the hidden ID: 1, TagStudio would then know what that file is (or it's other associated tags).

This implementation may require a local database or log file, which may be against your implementation idea, but it could help with recovery on that specific computer.

Having a graphical node-based editor/viewer for tags would greatly improve the experience dealing with complex tag setups.

Currently the Tag Database window needs to be closed in order to continue to use the app. It would be convenient to have it open while you for example add new tags.

Also a New Tag button in the Tag Database window would be nice.

System Details:
System: Garuda Linux (Arch)
Python version: 3.11.8
TagStudio Version: 6c5f0c2 (main)

Expected:
When multiple files are selected and a tag is added to a field that all files have, it should be added to all files.

Actually happens:
The tag is only added to the first file selected in the multi select.

Side note:
This also leads into the suggestion that when multiple files are selected they should show the intersection of all tags instead of only displaying "Mixed Data" this could allow for removing of tags from a bunch of files that don't share all of their tags.

Last:
Also just wanted to say thanks for open sourcing this, over the next few days I'm going to read over the code base and look into the audio waveform generation as I mentioned in my comment on youtube.

BUG

I assume that you should not be able to add the same fields an infinite number of times.

SUGGESTION

Or you should be able to give a name to the field when adding the fields to distinguish them.
You could then give different additional things to the fields like that you can only add a certain group of tags to a certain tag field.
If you can understand what I mean.

OCR being eventually implemented into this program would be great, but that's not exactly what I'm asking. It would be helpful if the program could automatically generate tags OR allow content to be searchable for Word / PDF type documents. I understand the initial implementation of this is for more assets, but this would make it very useful for documents as well.

One piece of software I use daily that helps with some of this is DevonThink 3 for MacOS (but that is more of its own database file manager than something TagStudio aims to be). But if the goal of TagStudio is to help finding files easier, implementing the search inside files or search through OCR could be incredibly powerful.

As the title says, duplicate tag data for the built-in tags are accruing over time inside of library files. This is likely due to a failure in the check system for built-in tags, thinking that the built-in tags are missing from the library when they're not.

So I just came across this project and must admit it pretty much answers all my needs... All your problems with sorting files is pretty much what I've been frustrated with for the longest time. And I noticed there is potential for it to become far more than just a tagging and sorting system. It could become the one stop solution for all your sorting/tracking needs.

My suggestion might sound a little bit more than what you intend to do but it could pretty much separate this project apart from everything else in light years.

Basically, why not have tags as values? Much like properties in Obsidian... Lets say you have a lot of receipts you want to keep track of, add a price value and with an add-on like an expense tracker you can use these values to build a summary of your expenses. But wait, there's more. Maybe you're a crazy person and you want to keep track of how many cats you've photographed your entire life. Add a value to the photo and have it calculate how many cats you've photographed.
Or maybe you want something more practical? well... how about a due date? add a notification pusher add-on and have the app remind you about a certain file, maybe its a file you need to work on, or maybe its a PDF of a bill you need to pay? the possibles are endless. Values can be extensible and used for pretty much anything.

Pretty sure this is due to improper handling of dark mode

When you select multiple image with shift and then attempts to add tags, in this case to meta tags, the first selected image is the only image in the selection of 3 (as I tested it) that were added the tag to meta tags. the 2 others had not the tag added.

https://github.com/CyanVoxel/TagStudio/blob/45e765862d7ec2bf2928134a91f0251a4d0b2068/tagstudio/src/core/library.py#L534-L543

Strips leading // from server shares e.g. //<server>/<share> gets normalized to \\\\<server>\\<share> but then gets caught by the above line stripping the leading \\ which in turn causes
https://github.com/CyanVoxel/TagStudio/blob/45e765862d7ec2bf2928134a91f0251a4d0b2068/tagstudio/src/core/library.py#L560-L571
to fail as the address is no longer accurate

swapping from strip to rstrip only removes trailing \\
path = os.path.normpath(path).strip('\\') becomes
path = os.path.normpath(path).rstrip('\\')
Which works for network shares.

Hello.
As promised, TagStudio is added to my TagsResearch repository. Took me a while because I stumbled upon few new programs in your comments section and found few new on Github and HN. You're free to check TagStudio entry and see if everything is correct (and maybe fill out empty spaces). But it's only based on the readme and screenshots so only the features that are currently in version 9.1.0-alpha were added.

Are there plans for plugin support? I would like to write a plugin that would take all files in the database and use as many details as possible to export a code that my QMV can use (for example: path, file name, type, size, tags). Alternatively just something that would export the file data in some text form (preferably JSON, but that's up to you) that can then be later processed by some other program.

Good job so far with TagStudio. Though I must say that we both have some fierce competition in this tagging field. But that's what makes it fun, right?

Having a ton of fun playing around with the program so far.
I think implementing an 'import tag' feature would be beneficial down the line, which would allow the community to share their entire tag set-ups, letting new users quickly get started.