&gt; TMSU does not alter your files in any way: they remain unchanged on disk, or on the network, wherever your put them. TMSU maintains its own database and you simply gain an additional view, which you can mount where you like, based upon the tags you set up.<p>I&#x27;m not so sure this is a great design decision. Now your tags are only in your sqlite file, and you&#x27;ll have to work extra hard to get a copy of the relevant tags when you backup&#x2F;copy etc.<p>I think storing tags in extended attributes[x], and possibly a separate utility that maintains and index (hopefully shouldn&#x27;t be needed just for the tags, but might help with a) exposing file-level tags (like ID3, exif, file-type (magic number) etc), and b) allow for automatic organization based on full text and other content-based indexing.<p>It appears, on a * nix system, the only major reason to stay away from extended attributes (apart from the limit on size of tag data) is NFS. But samba should (AFAIK) work fine with extended attributes.<p>As far as I can gather, Gnome Beagle is dead, and Gnome Tracker[t] has taken its place. But it&#x27;s not crystal clear if Tracker will index tags placed in files&#x27; extended attributes or not. If I understand correctly, Tracker&#x27;s own tagging utility, will only place&#x2F;edit tags in the Tracker database&#x2F;index. But the indexers will certainly honour file-level tags for some files.<p>I don&#x27;t really use full Desktop environments, but some kind of system with inotify support, and a Xapian or similar back-end (like Tracker), does seem like a good idea. It would certainly be nice to see such a system implemented in Go, but I think an <i>architecture</i> along the lines of Tracker is probably worth keeping: A database daemon, an indexer and a set of query&#x2F;view tools (I&#x27;m not a fan of the centralized tag database, though).<p>Another alternative to Tracker would be Recoll:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesbonscomptes.com&#x2F;recoll&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesbonscomptes.com&#x2F;recoll&#x2F;index.html</a><p>[t] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GNOME&#x2F;tracker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GNOME&#x2F;tracker</a><p>[x] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesbonscomptes.com&#x2F;pages&#x2F;extattrs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesbonscomptes.com&#x2F;pages&#x2F;extattrs.html</a><p>Btw, for editing&#x2F;automating ID3 tags, I recommend &quot;Ex Falso&quot;, the tag-editor for Quod Libet (which is an audio player): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quodlibet.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quodlibet.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a>