How to fix tags in Dolphin

Tags are an incredible organisational tool. Apps like Obsidian are becoming increasingly popular for their tag based organisation, while it is almost unheard of to keep photos outside of a library with proper organisational tools. MacOS has tags built into the filesystem.

Tags in Dolphin are already incredibly powerful, but ultimately unusable for serious work, because:

  1. They are untrustworthy, and;
  2. They lack good organisation and filtering tools

The UI for adding and editing tags is also very clunky and confusing to new users and needs work.

THEY ARE UNTRUSTWORTHY

(BUG REPORT SUBMITTED FOR THE FOLLOWING)

Currently it is incredibly easy to accidentally delete or lose tags. As I understand it (I am not a developer) they are stored in extended attributes, meaning any time a file is copied, moved or written over without maintaining extended attributes, tags and ratings are lost.

  • Using the cp command without “-a” will lose tags and ratings

  • Using certain backup software like Timeshift will not backup tags and ratings (use BorgBackup or a GUI for that like Vorta to make sure tags and ratings are backed up)

  • Saving over a file in an application that is not aware of tags will delete the tags.

  • Tags and ratings may not be copied from some mounted filesystems even when using the same copy or move tools in Dolphin that would usually keep them

  • Bugs frequently occur that make losing tags and ratings easy, so it seems like it is not a very thoroughly tested functionality.

Some of the above may have proper solutions, and when they don’t they should be clearly signposted for new users. Popups at specific times like when tagging MIME types linked to apps that are not known to keep extended attributes when saving would advise users to tag/rate the containing folder instead of the file itself, or be aware the tag or rating may be saved over. There could be a first time popup when adding tags or ratings to advise the user that the extended attributes must me maintained to not lose the tag, and give examples of when that may be.

I also wonder if it is possible for baloo to catch certain instances of tags/ratings being accidentally removed and to have a popup that allows the user to easily re-add them, with an explanation of how they got removed.

Also:

  • Baloo also doesn’t currently update automatically when tags and ratings are changed, so a manual refresh is required for any tag information to be updated anywhere in Dolphin. If you haven’t remembered to manually F5, you may be looking at out of date tag/rating information. (Bug report submitted)

  • Renaming tags when viewing All Tags or tag fragments works in unintuitive ways. You cannot just rename a tag from there, instead you have to select all the files with that tag, hit Edit Tag in the Info Panel, then delete the tag you want to rename and re-add it. (Bug report submitted)

THEY LACK GOOD ORGANISATION AND FILTERING TOOLS

(BUG REPORT SUBMITTED FOR THE FOLLOWING)

There is a filter by tags option in the search panel but it is very limited. It currently doesn’t work at all (bug report submitted), but when it did it consisted of a drop down menu of every tag in your entire indexed system, which you can tick to only show items with those tags. This list can be very long if you have a lot of tags and has no search function within it; in fact it can be so long it can go off the bottom of the screen, and there is no scroll function to get to the bottom of the list. A search function and a scroll function for that Add Tags dropdown in the search panel would go a long way to allowing users to sort through lots of tags. An even more useful way to make that list easier to navigate would be to hide tags if they would yield no results; that is, only show tags in the folder being searched, that appear with the tags you have already selected.

Dolphin also of course has a dedicated filter bar, but as far as I know there is no way to use that to easily type out the tags you want to see listed.

THE ACTUAL SOLUTION: A TAGS PANEL

Personally I think the current functionality to add, edit, view, filter by tags is confusing and scattered throughout the UI. What we need is a dedicated Tags Panel.

I don’t think tags need to be removed from the Info and Places panels, although in the Places panel, although I wouldn’t be having tags appear in the Places panel by default, aside from All Tags, instead dragged there from the Tags Panel or All Tags.

Tags Panel Basic View

The Tags Panel will only list tags within the current directory and its sub-directories. Using the tickboxes initiates a search in the current directory, without enabling the search panel.
The tickbox on the left is the same as the Add Tags tickboxes from the Search Panel, only showing in the search items with the selected tags. The tickbox on the right (which ideally would be visually differentiated even when un-ticked rather than my solution of confusing “show” and “hide” labels above the columns) allows you to hide items with certain tags from your search. As you check those boxes, the list grows shorter, only showing options that would yield results; that is, only show tags in the folder being searched or its sub-directories, that appear with the tags you have checked “Show”, and that don’t appear with the tags you have checked “Hide”.

With this filter functionality from the Tags Panel, the “Add Tags” dropdown in the search panel is redundant and should be removed, and the user can use a combination of the search panel and the new Tags Panel to filter their search results. This would require the Tags Panel to respond to your search settings like where you are searching (“From Here (location)” VS “Your files”).

N.B. to navigate to a tag fragment for a selected file, you would still need to click on the tag from the Info Panel, but I think this is the correct design, keeping the Tags Panel for filtering.

You can search for tags from the list using the search box, a basic text filter to find tags in a long list.

The add tag button to the left of the search box turns the whole panel into an add/edit tags menu, similar to the window that appears when clicking “Edit…” (in the Tags section) from the Info Panel – perhaps this should be more of an “edit tags” button than “add tag”, but I used the add tag symbol in my design because it was already there. When this button is clicked, the list of tags to filter by becomes list of all tags, the ones that apply to your selected item already ticked, and the search box becomes an Add Tags box. This mode should also be able to be activated with a keyboard shortcut.
The Add Tags box is similar to the Create New Tags box from that Edit Tags window, but I would amend its functionality to be able to add both new and existing tags. Currently to add tags, you bring up the Edit Tags window, and add one tag at a time by either selecting it from the list or typing the tag exactly and in full. To improve this experience, a case-insensitive autocomplete function should allow you to easily search existing tags by simply typing it in the Add Tags box and pressing enter once the autocomplete has done its job and found your desired existing tag. Once you have pressed enter and added that tag, your cursor will remain in the add tags box for you to immediately type another tag, instead of exiting the window as is the current behaviour, which requires you to click “Edit…” again to add another tag.
Another improvement over the current Edit Tags window would be to sort all currently selected tags for your item to the top of the list.

2 Likes

I realised immediately after posting that when the tags panel is in the standard filter by tag mode (not the edit tags mode, where it would presumably behave like the current Edit Tags menu) the tags in the list should definitely work as links to the tag fragment (just the normal tag fragment you’d access through All Tags or by clicking a tag in the Info Panel, not searching in the current directory).

1 Like

I have now added this feature request over at bugs.kde

Something I might add is that in the filter mode, the panel would show any parent tags for tags that exist within the searched directory, but wouldn’t show the options to tick to filter by them. Add tags mode would also have parent tags of course.

It would also sort tags by their parent tags. e.g. tag1/tag2 and tag1/tag3 would always appear together, as:

tag1
  tag2
  tag3

Visually, I would suggest connecting lines between them like folders in Dolphin’s Details view, rather than just indentation like above.

When searching, parent tags would still be shown even if they don’t match the search, as they are useful information about the tag you are searching.

An update: Tags are completely broken in Plasma 6. New tags get added wrong from the Edit Tags menu, – they are added with a “/” in front of them – and can’t be seen by baloo, nor can they be sorted with my existing tags. Those existing tags do not seem to be sorted alphabetically in the Edit Tags menu anymore, and the tag filter menu from the search panel still doesn’t drop down (as I mentioned in the original post).

That is almost every part of tags broken (you can still drag files into tag fragments to tag them). This is what I mean that they are untrustworthy. They do not seem to get any attention from developers despite being imo the main draw of Dolphin and even Plasma.

I can’t post links, but here are the bug report numbers if you want to keep track of them over at bugs.kde

Sections of original post as Bug Reports/Feature Requests

Bug 488057 – Filter by tags (Add Tags in search panel) could be easier to navigate. Requires scroll, other ways to search or shorten list of tags.

Bug 488055 – Tags and ratings are VERY easy to accidentally delete.

Bug 488154 – Dedicated Tags Panel Feature Request. I did fix some errors in this version, and the comments contain a few more details.

Other Bug Reports Mentioned

Bug 488047 – “Add Tags” dropdown in search panel does not appear

Bug 489152 – Tags in Add/Edit Tags window are not automatically sorted

Bug 488588 – Tags are added incorrectly through add/edit tags menu

Other Relevant Bugs/Feature Requests

Bug 488056 – Renaming tags from tag fragments does not work as expected

Bug 432720 – Tag management window needs a search/filter field (not my bug report)

My system is based on Arch Linux with Kernel 6.9.7,
Plasma 6.1.2 (Wayland), KDE Frameworks 6.3.0 and qt 6.7.2
I’ve searched for exactly this:
“Once you have pressed enter and added that tag, your cursor will remain in the add tags box for you to immediately type another tag, instead of exiting the window as is the current behaviour, which requires you to click “Edit…” again to add another tag.”

But as my problem exists, the tag window always closes after tickling just only one tag, so that I have to reopen the tag (sub) menu again.
So, what do I do wrong? I would like to keep the tags sub menu open until I have, e.g. tickled 3 tags, maybe more, without auto close of the tags menu.
Thank you in advance,
R.

The part of the post you are quoting is part of my proposition for brand new features that do not currently exist.

But what you describe does sound like a bug – I can tick multiple tags, although I can only add one new one by typing it in. I’m also on Plasma 6.1.2, NixOS unstable channel. Dolphin version 24.05.1.

You might want to submit a bug report for this.

I’m sorry to tell you this, though you have replied very quickly.
This lack (sorry again) has been existing since the beginning of baloo tagging and was mentioned several times.
I don’t understand, why you say
“Once you have pressed enter and added that tag, your cursor will remain in the add tags box for you to immediately type another tag…” as if this is already working smoothly.
As I said, I’m sorry, I’m confused.
Do you have an idea, when this ‘feature’ will be published?
Thank you again,
R.

My post is a feature request, I am not a developer. I used present tense to refer to the hypothetical behaviour of the concept I proposed and the mockup.

Aah, I see, I understand the concept…

Hello, sorry to disturb again,
do you have any idea, to whom I can send my issue, who can solve it (maybe in future)?
And, may it be possible to use something like a short script called ‘stopPropagation’ and, more important, where and how would I exactly need to insert such a script?
Thank you again,
R.

I listed some bug reports in an earlier comment, from memory a couple of them suggest this functionality. Perhaps check them out, Cc yourself and comment your support. I can’t post links but they are over at bugs.kde. You could also post a dedicated feature request on bugs.kde.

Did you hear about the slashes as well?

That’s Bug 488588