Any Known Alternatives to DEVONthink for Linux or Windows?

Posted by Paul Korm
Jul 14, 2018 at 03:30 PM

As with anything to do with “metadata”—it depends. Including the definition of “metadata”. The way Windows or macOS handles tags varies, and the way third party software on those platforms recognizes tags varies by developer. Tags are not the only form of metadata, either, just the one that most people are familiar with and like to chat about. In theory, a database can support the metadata managed by the file system and augment it with custom metadata, either defined by the developer or the end user or both. In practice, on macOS, that doesn’t happen much. DEVONthink has no user-defined metadata, and a few developer-defined attributes. macOS and Windows support additional attributes in the file system but these are not easily accessed by the end user.

nathanb wrote:

>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.