I'm going to admit that I didn't read the whole article.
I remember about 10-15 years ago that there were a lot of photo organizers that supported tagging. Tag the events as birthday or the people's names. I saw a lot of people who would then post "My photo organizer has been discontinued and I spent years organizing by tags. How do I migrate all the tags to another photo editor."
The hierarchical file system is kind of a lowest common denominator. I can copy a directory structure from ext4 to brtfs to zfs to ntfs to exfat to macos or whatever and have the same organization.
I like to put the DC stuff directly in my filesystem xattrs, but using a sidecar file will get you compatibility with any old filesystem and with any tooling that might destroy or disregard an xattr.
This is an amazing bit already, but it would be a 10/10 joke if you could work "year of the Linux desktop" into it somewhere.
If you were serious, then I would point out that even nerd file browsers like Nautilus do not support xattr metadata editing, searching, or even viewing and Linux metadata indexing systems e.g. Beagle are all long-dead projects. The whole idea has no traction.
GP is right that XMP-supporting FOSS software is heavily biased toward media-management software, especially for photos, and that there is a distinct lack of a good Free Software file manager that supports XMP generically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform#S...
I currently use a combination of my own filetype-detection-and-tagging software “CHECKING YOU OUT” (insert Dropbox meme here), Windows Explorer with “XMP IFilter Desktop Edition”, and voidtools' “Everything” 1.5:
> The hierarchical file system is kind of a lowest common denominator.
Which, in the form of folder and file names, can be your the first layer of tags. But familiarity with file systems is going out of the window as well, I've been made aware.
I have some file names that are really long. If I can use 255 characters then why not name the files with lots of words so that I can use "find" or some other file index utility.
I found the article from 2022 about younger people not understanding them.
I have multuple friends who are college engineering professors, and they've been dumbfounded by the lack of basic file system knowledge. I had a hard time believing it, but ive seen it first hand in highschool age relatives.
I remember about 10-15 years ago that there were a lot of photo organizers that supported tagging. Tag the events as birthday or the people's names. I saw a lot of people who would then post "My photo organizer has been discontinued and I spent years organizing by tags. How do I migrate all the tags to another photo editor."
The hierarchical file system is kind of a lowest common denominator. I can copy a directory structure from ext4 to brtfs to zfs to ntfs to exfat to macos or whatever and have the same organization.