Luddite under protest<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://eattherich.club/@swaggboi" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>swaggboi</span></a></span> <a href="https://eattherich.club/tags/iTunes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>iTunes</span></a>.</p><p>Don’t run away.. hear me out. Think about how good <a href="https://eattherich.club/tags/iTunes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>iTunes</span></a> is with organizing music files. The files are still in a filesystem but iTunes manages them. The directory structure is a product of the <a href="https://eattherich.club/tags/ID3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ID3</span></a> metadata standard & they are kept in sync. If a track is in the genre “techno” & you decide it’s more accurately described as “electronica/trance/psychedelic”, you refine the genre in the iTunes db, which the updates the ID3 tag & moves the file from e.g. ~/music/techno to ~/music/electronica/trance/psychedelic. When you are outside iTunes, the directory structure is sensible & intuitive. When you are inside iTunes, you can search, filter, & organize based on metadata.</p><p>So you asked about PDFs as an example. I ditched iTunes (& mac & windows entirely) at one point, but at least back in the day you could (ab)use ID3 tags for PDFs since they don’t break the PDF for whatever reason. Some people then used iTunes to organize their PDFs (likely books) in that way.</p><p>So I’m not saying install iTunes.. it may not even work these days.. no idea. But the point is iTunes sets a good example of how media can be well organized.</p><p>I’ve not used <a href="https://eattherich.club/tags/calibre" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>calibre</span></a> in a while but perhaps it has improved. Might be worth a look.</p><p>I did my own hack. I use exiftool to set the metadata using the standard PDF fields. Then I wrote a <a href="https://eattherich.club/tags/procmail" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>procmail</span></a> script that created an email header from the PDF metadata and then used the procmail language to put the file through a series of conditionals & scoring & ultimately drop the file in a well-organized location. It’s a use procmail was not intended for yet strangely useful for objects that have nothing to do with email. I got side-tracked and didn’t finish the project but that’s just to give an idea of what’s possible.</p><p>Today I still manually maintain a directory structure, my metadata is a mess, and whenever I move or rename a file references to that file from apps like gnucash end up inconsistent. So I still need to get my shit together.</p><p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://eattherich.club/@jmhorner" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>jmhorner</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mstdn.social/@unlofl" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>unlofl</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://piggo.space/users/piggo" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>piggo</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://nya.social/@purple" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>purple</span></a></span> <span class="h-card"><a href="https://declin.eu/users/i" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>i</span></a></span></p>