Nice article. As a data hoarder this is something I've run into several times over the years. Still haven't found a great solution. If xattrs were more universa

Nice article. As a data hoarder this is something I've run into several times over the years. Still haven't found a great solution. If xattrs were more universally supported, then that would probably be the best solution. Instead, I've come to specialized solutions for different data types. For research papers (in PDF), I have a half-baked python solution I wrote myself that cobbles together the cermine pdf parser/content extractor, the whoosh full text search engine, and an ncurses-based interface. For personal images, I use the elodie CLI tool, but I'd like to move away from it as I don't like how it modifies files by embedding metadata in them. For research/computer vision data, I use custom tooling based on sidecar files and a pg database kept in sync with the sidecars . For audio samples, I just use a commercial solution, sononym, that uses an sqlite database. For other miscellaneous use cases, I've also used TMSU. Pretty nice as a more general purpose solution, except for the inherent issues mentioned by the article. So yeah, I agree it's a hard problem.