Any Known Alternatives to DEVONthink for Linux or Windows?

Posted by nathanb
Jul 14, 2018 at 01:56 PM

Paul Korm wrote:
Finder searches are far more adaptable and configurable than any
>DEVONthink search
>Tembo for quick on-the-fly searching
>Ammonite for tag searching
>Apple Notes or Curiota for on-the-fly note taking
>Forklift 3—lots of nice features for folder and document management
> >For me, the above replace 99% of what DEVONthink does. I don’t need a
>database to store documents. I don’t need fancy sync—iCloud is
>adequate. The See Also & Classify feature is interesting but I rarely
>use it. The amount of time spent on managing and curating folders in
>the file system is no different than the same task in a database. And
>every macOS app is integrated with the file system by default, but none
>of them are integrated with DEVONthink—if you use DEVONthink to store
>documents you are 95% locked into using DEVONthink to launch them for
>editing.
> >Don’t get me wrong—it is a nice product, well engineered and
>reliable. But for me it is also overhead with little payback.
> >Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>>Can you mention some of these utilities?

I’m on Windows so don’t know the specifics here, but am assuming that storing files in the file system vs a database are roughly the same.

I’ve long wrestled with this issue about where the metadata for a file should live. I agree that far and away the best place to store document metadata (tags) SHOULD BE in the file itself so the user isn’t depending on a separate index (database or not) for curation. Lots of file types have their own metadata standards built in (incompatible with each other, of course). Like adobe pdf tags, exif info in photos, and MS Office Docs even has their own group of tags which you can get file explorer to show….

...ah that specifically brings me back a couple years when I was trying to migrate a bunch of my company files to Sharepoint. I was surprised to find that ALL that embedded metadata for Office files beyond the filename was completely ignored upon import…. Sharepoint even ignored the basic created/modified dates. I was quite perplexed that Microsoft regarded what seems to be a fairly good metadata scheme on it’s own documents as not worth bothering to preserve. I mean, if MS is going to ignore this info upon migrating to a ‘more modern’ platform, then who IS using these tags? Que the MS jokes about abandoning a good thing for stupid corporate reasons (RIP OneNote) but this particular example is typical of the whole industry. Picasa being another good example. I use AutoCAD too , a horrific Frankenstein of 3 decades of different embedded metadata schemes that inexplicably still ‘coexist’ within the most recent version.

Examples like that over the years have made me cynical about relying on file-based proprietary metadata for ANYTHING large or long-term. Is this situation generally more stable in Mac-world?

Besides the trouble with changing metadata standards and maintaining a mixed file system of different standards, isn’t the other main benefit to use a database is to browse the scope of your metadata (push) instead of just blind search (pull)?

Take tagging pdfs inside the pdf (using the Adobe standard). If I copy a directory of those pdfs to a different pc, is there any software that scans those to show how many of each tag exist or do you need to explicitly (get lucky) search for them? Maybe I’m just missing a whole category of software. I’m not an academic but I’ve always had this impression that a solid granular metadata situation exists in the Adobe world that I’ve never been able to leverage because in the business and engineering world not enough people care about or even recognize document metadata as being useful.

The thing is, when I curate my own collection, I want to create a dashboard to it beyond ‘powerful search’. I want to be able to see the scope of my category and tagging scheme to help guide how I label the newest item but also to remind me what my whole library looks like and about the connections I’ve made in the past. My recall memory is garbage but my recognition memory is pretty good. So I need my collection to remind me about stuff I filed for a good reason a year ago that I’ve completely forgotten about today. Let’s say I ran across a great white paper “What Entomology can Teach Us About Information Theory” a year ago. If I file it in folders, the best I can do (i think) is to tag it with a bunch of keywords so it’ll be more likely to pop up in search. If I file/index it in a database then I can associate it with various knowledge graphs/maps and have it show up in a few different branches of tag/category trees. For me to rediscover it the first way, I’d have to one day actually search my own stuff for ‘ants and knowledge’ or something like that…which will NEVER happen because my recall memory is garbage. I’ll remember that article IF I run across it again and then the old idea connections it spawned then would spring up again with hopefully new insight today. But the only way…well, the most likely way…I’ll run across it again will not be upon search discovery, it’ll be through navigating a curated knowledge graph/tree.

Am I way off that it’s not possible to have the freedom of just files in folders AND a useful knowledge graph of those files? If I’m wrong, please point me in the right direction!