Hey, I'm currently trialing Directory Opus and I make extensive use of tagging and comments for cataloging my files. I've found Directory Opus to be as good or even better than software dedicated to cataloging. One of the challenges is I'm accessing many files on a linux server via Samba. This prevents me from using the extended metadata: Comments, Rating, and Tags. A solution would be appreciated!
I was looking around and XYplorer has a tagging system that uses a tag database in the application folder. I don't know if this would be effective if multiple users access files on a centralized server.
Opus will store labels in your configuration file if it can't write them to the filesystem (or if you tell it not to use the filesystem). When that happens, the labels will be stored against a particular path, which means if the file/folder currently at that path is moved or renamed then the label will not move with it (unlike when storing labels in the filesystem).
Comments and other metadata:
Opus will store those in the files themselves as long as it is a file format which actually has somewhere to store them (e.g. there is no comment or author field in a plain text file), and which Opus knows how to edit (or where something has installed a standard Metadata Handler shell extension, in some cases).
You can also store comments/descriptions in a descript.ion text file, which is an old format dating back to the DOS days which some software still supports.
Hmm, so I tested out the functionality and I do like that tags natively can be stored on external filesystems and follow the file around.
I'm curious to know how difficult/if it's possible to have the internal file mover keep track of labels and extra metadata (and potentially allow for custom columns) and follow files around. The alternative is to have an option to automatically use descript.ion on non-NTFS filesystem only to keep the robust NTFS version of metadata active. I also noticed that it's not possible to rate files even with descript.ion and moving files causes the comment to disappear. Descript.ion comments also don't appear on the comment column.