Introduction
TagSpaces PRO is a desktop application based on the Community Edition with some features added on top. A detailed overview of these features can be found in here. TagSpaces PRO is intended to be used by users which have already used the community edition and are expecting the advanced features offered by the PRO version.
Generating persistent thumbnails
When the user opens a directory the application scans it’s content and tries to generate mini previews the so called thumbnails automatically.
The free version of TagSpaces supports thumbnail generation only for image files such as JPG or PNG. The PRO version, on the other hand, tries to create thumbnails from the following files format
- Images: PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF, SVG, WEBP, TIFF
- Videos: WEBM, OGV, MP4, M4V
- Notes: HTML (uses the embedded screenshot, if created with the TagSpaces Web Clipper
- Text files: TXT, MD, source code files (uses the first lines found in the files)
- Bookmarks: URL (uses the embedded screenshot, if created with the TagSpaces Web Clipper)
- Ebooks: EPUB (uses the integrated ebook cover image)
- Archives: ZIP (uses the first found image in the archive)
- Portable Documents: PDF
- Office Documents: ODT, ODP, ODS, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX (uses the embedded preview image if available)
The generated thumbnails are persisted in the .ts folder located in every folder you browse. This feature significantly accelerates the browsing of folders containing many files. The thumbnail generation can be activated or deactivated in the application settings.
Custom thumbnails for files and folders
Starting with version 3.2, TagSpaces PRO offers the ability to manually set and change the thumbnail of every file type and folder. The following video show how to set a custom image as a thumbnail to any folder used in TagSpaces.
Adding a custom thumbnail to any kind of file type, can be achieved in a similar manner from the properties section of any file.
Advanced search
In addition to the searching by files name and by tag, the search in the PRO versions supports the following features on top:
Search by type
In the file type dropdown you can specify types of the files you want to search. The following groups are supported:
- Pictures and Photos: JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.
- Documents: PDF, ODF, DOCX, EXL, etc.
- Notes: MD, TXT, HTML, etc.
- Audio files: OGG, MP3, WAV, etc.
- Video files: WEBM, OGV, MP4, etc.
- Archives: ZIP, RAR, TGZ, 7Z, etc.
- Bookmarks: URL, LNK, etc.
- eBook EPUB, MOBI, AZW, PRC, etc.
In addition to that we offer some special filters:
- Folders - showing only folder
- Files - showing only files
- Untagged files or folders - showing only files and folders witch are not tagged
Search by file size
This search option will filter the file by their size.
- Empty - will filter files with zero size
- Tiny - will filter files smaller than 10KB
- Very small - will filter files smaller than 100KB
- Small - will filter files smaller than 1MB
- Medium - will filter files smaller than 50MB
- Large - will filter files smaller than 1GB
- Huge - will filter files bigger that 1GB
Search by last modified date
Here you can specify in which period the files you are searching should have been modified. This filter supports the following options:
- Today - will show files and folders modified today
- Yesterday - will show results modified yesterday
- Past 7 days - will show results modified in the last 7 days
- Past 30 days - will shows results modified in the last 30 days
- Past 6 months - will show files and folders modified in the last 6 months from today
- Past year - will show files and folders modified in the last 12 months from today
- More than one year - will show files and folder older than one year
Full text search
TagSpaces PRO supports full text search for text (.TXT), markdown (.MD) and html (.HTML) files. You can activate this feature for every location individually in the “Edit Location” dialog, as seen in the following screenshot.
After the activating of this feature, by indexing of this location, the application will try to extract the text content of the supported files and create a keyword list with will be considered later by the search algorithm.
Note: On locations with many big text files, activating this features may slow down the performance of the application, so be careful on which location you are activating it.
Global search
Starting with version 3.5, TagSpaces Pro offers searching in all locations. We call this feature “Global search”. It works on local and remote S3 based locations. The feature can be activated by clicking the Global-button in the search area, as seen in the following screenshot.
Once in Global search-mode you will see one additional search options called “Force re-indexing all locations”. Activating this checkbox will force TagSpaces to create a new index for every location before in searches in it. This options will deliver most accurate search result but can take more time, especially re-indexing remote locations or locations containing many files.
All other search related settings should work as known from the single location search. The search result limit is applying here, so once reached TagSpaces will stop the search and will no go in the remaining un-searched locations.
Note: Global search should be considered as a feature in Beta status. There could be some edge cases which are not functioning correctly. Please share any glitches with us, we will try to fix them.
Description for folders and files
In addition to the tagging, in the TagSpaces PRO you have the ability to annotate every file or folder with a description. This is useful in particular if you want to add some more textual content to given a file or folder. This description information is managed in the properties area of every entry, and can be opened by clicking on the i-button, marked with (1) on the following screenshot.
The properties area reveals the following information:
- Name - the name of the current file or folder, click on the rename button will make the name editable
- Tags - shows all the tags (sidecar and file name based) of the current entry. You can add new tags by selecting them from the dropdown menu or drag & drop them here from the tag library. Removing tag is possible with the (x) button placed on every tag.
- Description - shows the description of the current file or folder if available
- Path - showing the path of the file or folder, clicking the move button will allow you to move this file
- Date modified - shows the last modified data and time of the entry
- Size - shows the size if the current file in byes, it is displayed only for files
The file and folder descriptions which is marked with (2) on the previous screenshot, can be edited by clicking the edit button or just clicking directly on the description area. The descriptions text can contain markdown allowing you to add basic formatting, links and lists to the content.
The descriptions is indexed by the search algorithm and considered in the search results. If a given file or folder has a descriptions, the first few words from it a displayed in the grid perspective, as marked with (3) on the previous screenshot.
Hint: Editing file and folders descriptions is available in TagSpaces PRO. The community edition supports only displaying existing descriptions for both files and directories.
File description
For adding the description to a given file, TagSpaces PRO use the same sidecar file as the one used for the sidecar files. This file is called exactly like the original file but with .json at the end in the hidden .ts folder of current folder.
~ some-folder
├── .ts
│ ├── file5.png.json - contains tags and description for file.png
│ ├── file6.docx.json - contains tags and description for file6.docx
│ └── tsm.json
├── file5.png
└── file6.docx
Folder description
For adding the description to a given folder, TagSpaces PRO creates a sidecar file called tsm.json in the hidden .ts folder of current folder. This is file contains also the tags for this specific folder.
~ some-folder
├── sub-folder1
│ ├── .ts
│ │ └── tsm.json - contains tags and description for sub-folder1
│ ├── file1.jpg
│ └── file2.pdf
├── .ts
│ └── tsm.json - contains tags and description some-folder
├── file3.png
└── file4.docx
Custom folder colors
With this feature every folder opened in TagSpaces can have its own background color. In addition to tagging you can use colors to mark folders used for particular use case or area of work. For example you can differentiate your personal folders from your work folders with color or you can mark folders containing sensitive or important information.
Connect S3 compatible object storages as locations
With this feature TagSpaces PRO is going into direction of supporting the Cloud as file storage. In general it enables you to creating a location pointing to a remote object storages or buckets on AWS S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Minio infrastructure. By doing this you get a fully functional file organizer, browser and navigator for this bucket, directly in TagSpaces. You don’t have to download separately and eventually to upload them back in order to preview, edit or annotate them.
You can recognize object storage location by the cloud icon in front of their name, as seen in the next screenshot.
In order to connect such location you will need to know the bucket name, the access key, the secret access key and the data center location for the particular bucket. If you have a location with a deep folder structure you can also specify the internal path to the files you want to manage in this location.
Tutorial: For detailed instructions on how to connect an AWS S3 location to TagSpaces, read this tutorial from the documentation.
Comparing to user interfaces provided by AWS visible on the previous screenshot, TagSpaces gives you the following features on top:
- Direct preview of the files
- Direct editing of HTML, MD and other text based files
- Direct streaming of the supported audio and video formats
- Showing thumbnails of the files
- Tagging and Search
Using this feature you are creating basically a Dropbox or an Evernote replacement, where you have the full control on your files and data.
Note: If your bucket contains many files and the initial opening with indexing takes a lot of time you can make use of the enabling the manual indexing for this location.
Monitoring the changes in a location
This features is useful, when you have locations placed on a network drive or pointing to a folder synced with for example Dropbox, where changes to these folders happens in background while TagSpaces is running. This can happen if you work collaboratively with someone on a network or your Dropbox syncs files from other devices. In such cases TagSpaces monitors the folder pointed by the location with all its sub-folders for changes, such as file creations, deletions or renames and reflects these changes in the user interface of the app.
This option can be activated manually for every location individually in the location properties dialog, as displayed in the screenshot.
Note: This feature is not available on locations pointing to a S3 compatible object storage.
Persisted manual index
For locations containing many files, it may make sense to disable the automatic indexing taking place on the opening of this location. You can activate this options for every location individually on its creation or on its properties screen as seen in the previous screenshot. The properties dialog is accessible from the context menu of any location. Enabling this options will speed up the loading of the location, especially on network based locations (W/LAN or S3 object stores). Instead of the indexing, the application will try to load a previously generated index file tsi.json located in the root folder of the location.
If you don not have such persisted index file, you can create one manually with the command “Refresh Location Index” from the location context menu, as seen on the following screenshot.
Tag extraction from location
In the content menu of every tag group in the PRO version, there is an entry called “Collect Tags From Current Location”, which does exactly this. It analyses the index of the current location and identifies tags with unique names, which are then added to the tag group from which the operation was started.
Geo location tagging
Geo Tagging can be use to add geo coordinates as a tag to any kind of files. It is useful to connect your photos or other documents with a geo location. This can be used for planning you vacation or next trip. In order to use this feature you have to use the smart tag geo-location. When you apply it to a file, the dialog shown on following screenshot will appear. Here with the help of the OpenStreetMap and you can select any location somewhere in the world. The geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of this location will be converted in the plus codes format, which is a for codding geo coordinates with smaller amount of characters .
Custom date and time tagging
With the help of the custom-date smart tag, the user can add any date and time as a tag to any file or folder.
Signed Installers for Windows
We are providing installers for Windows, which are digitally signed with modern certificate from Globalsign. Signing distributed artifacts has some advantages such as:
- authenticity - Tells the user where the software is coming from.
- integrity - Demonstrates the code was not modified after the signing process. This will also alert the user for a potential file corruption during the download process.
Technical support
For our TagSpaces PRO users we offer a technical support per email.
