Interesting plasmoid: Drop2Tag
While browsing around kde-look.org, I’ve stumbled upon a nice little Plasma scripted widget, and I’m publishing this to have it get more exposure.
A good part of the KDE community knows at least little about Nepomuk, and its ability to attach semantic tags to your files – basically words that describe the file, be it an image, a text document, or anything you’d like. For example, you could tag all the photos from your vacation with the name of the place you’ve been. After that, you can recall tagged files by accessing the nepomuksearch://hasTag:TAG_NAME url in Dolphin or Konqueror (there are more advanced uses, but I won’t cover them here), where TAG_NAME is your tag.
Up to now, the usual way to tag files was to either select them in batch and add a tag, or do them individually, then click “Add tag”, then select the tag or create a new one. It was kind of laborious, although not too complicated. And that’s where Drop2Tag comes in.
Drop2Tag stays in your desktop, configured for one of your Nepomuk tags. Then, you just need to drag files to it to have them automatically tagged. Also, clicking on the big Nepomuk icon will open your file manager with the nepomuksearch://hasTag URL with the selected tag. Neat.
The plasmoid is written in Python (I’ve taken a look at its source) and despite being very early in development, it already does the job very nicely – I have put one on my “Graphics manipulation” desktop activity to tag photos and images. A nice addition would be to select the tag from the plasmoid itself, rather than using the configuration option – it would make things much more flexible. Perhaps a Plasma.ComboBox would do the job here.
In any case, I’d like to congratulate its author (nik3nt3) for a job well done.
That’s a really useful plasmoid. It would be nice if it could be combined with the folderview plasmoid. Imageine: If a file is dropped into a folderview configured to show all files tagged as ‘important’ for example, it would be tagged with tag ‘important’, too.
Does it recursively tag the contents of folders, or just the folder itself?
@Herbert Graeber: Have you filled wish about the folder view idea to brainstorm on kde forums or to bugs.kde.org? Sounds very wonderful idea!
The Nepomuk needs better UI. We really need ways to easily search files (not just tags) and tag files etc. Always when someone is speaking about Nepomuk, it is technojumbomumbo. Give normal users more basic easily understanding things how to use it. Not that the tech side would be boring ;)
I agree with the folderview idea. Also it has to be done with ratings in mind, so a folderview could be configured to show only files rated 4 or above, etc.
I wish Amarok, Digikam, Dolphin, Plasma and Nepomuk were more integrated together.
In fact, the standard “open” dialog should be aware of ratings/tags (show only / order by).
Actually I don’t care about a desktop search functionality. I never search through my files. I always know where they are (that’s why we have folders). But I wish developers would use Nepomuk to bring “intelligent behaviours” to the whole desktop, so everything would be automatic and elegant.
What a surprise seeing my plasmoid on planetkde! thx
@TheBlackCat: No it does not recursively tag the contents of a folder. But I will think about it….
@einar77:
- Can I take parts of your text as description for the plasmoid on kdelook.org?
- I was also looking for a way to change the tag without opening the config-dialog: Scrollwheel, double-click, buttons or kind of a menu? I didn’t find an answer yet..
/nik
@nik3nt3:
1. Go ahead, it will help people to understand better.
2. You can try with a Plasma.ComboBox (IIRC there is a themed combobox) and connect to currentIndexChanged (or similar signal, I’m going from memory!) to know when the tag is changed. I think you can scroll the combo box with the wheel as well.
IMO the configuration page could be used to add tags, rather than selecting them. I don’t know how much of Nepomuk is wrapped by PyKDE, though.