Ask HN: Personal Database Tool?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20121533

by pockettanyas • 7 years ago

24 20 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm looking for a tool where I can dump content (images, notes, quotes, names of movies), tag each item with multiple tags ("book" "completed" "5 stars"), and then search for the content by tag ("show me all books I tagged with 5 stars"). Is there a good tool I can use for this?

goohex• 7 years ago

Airtable https://airtable.com/

flukus• 7 years ago

There a re CLI tagging tools like this: https://tmsu.org/

It's mostly driven by folders and symlinks, so you could create your own with a few shell scripts.

lovelearning• 7 years ago

Most note taking tools allow all that - organize content, tag, and search. They differ in user experience. Try Evernote, OneNote, Zotero, but there are many more.

jvvlimme• 7 years ago

Notion.so?

scrappyjoe• 7 years ago

A few years ago there was an OSS tool called Tagspaces that did exactly this. It was great, and briefly replaced Evernote for me.

At the time I used it quite successfully to manage research material across a range of projects; it ultimately hit a wall because it was an electron app that consumed huge amounts of RAM.

However, they are still around and appear to have moved away from electron so you may have more luck now.

jesterson• 7 years ago

I'd suggest to try Notion and AirTable. Notion is slightly more then just personal database, AirTable might be useful if you like working with tables/databases.

SanchoPanda• 7 years ago

Recoll search engine is a mature, robust, and battle tested solution. Set up is fairly straightforward and there a webui available as well.

lagerstedt• 7 years ago

Try using a text file and grep?

gexla• 7 years ago

Take a look at Perkeep.

https://perkeep.org/

You can also do a search here for the name to see other posts on the project.

bdibs• 7 years ago

Check out Bookstack https://www.bookstackapp.com

tmaly• 7 years ago

I could imagine a simple cli with S3 or some other key value cloud storage could be used to accomplish this.

noobly4• 7 years ago

Emacs Org-Mode!

To expand:

dump content (images, notes, quotes, names of movies)

The images I would keep in relevant logs/wikis, or a timestamped/datetree journal (in it's own file, a header, or a subheader - whatever's more suitable/comfortable). I mostly save images for fun and logging purposes though. The notes I would keep under a (tagged) header that it belongs too, or in the datetree diary if it's personal. Same with the quotes. I keep names of movies I should watch under a (tagged) 'media' header in my tasks.org file (my other org files are wiki.org and archive.org, fwiw).

tag each item with multiple tags ("book" "completed" "5 stars")

Tags are a built-in feature, but for the '5 stars' portion, you can go a step further and assign a key-value property to an item, say 'STARS:' and a value, like '5'.

search for the content by tag ("show me all books I tagged with 5 stars")

And this would be done by doing a search, a tag search, with this syntax specifically: `+books&+STARS="5"`

It's a very flexible system!

lberk• 7 years ago

I'd agree with this suggestion, especially if you're willing to put in a bit of legwork to start and learn some of the basics of org-mode.

To me though, one of the killer features of org-mode (compared to some of the other, SaaS product offerings) is that under the hood it's /just/ a plain-text file. You know (unlike the SaaS stuff) it'll be around for 30+ years. To me, it's incredibly valuable when building my own personal information repo/db to know it'll be around as long as I am. Not contingent on a company to remain around or profitable to keep access to my data.

anotheryou2• 7 years ago

do you have a nice workflow for images and files?

and what are the limits to keeping everything in one file? theoretically i see no downside to it.

noobly4• 7 years ago

What do you mean about the images and files, specifically? If embedding images within an org file, it is super easy, just do ‘[[file://image/path.jpg]]’ and run M-x org-toggle-inline-images (i think that’s the command).

My org files (all of which reside in my agenda directory, ~/org) are divided primarily into archives.org (i keep a datetree log here), wiki.org (bookmarks, notes etc), and tasks.org. With sparse trees, narrowing to subtree etc I tend to keep big monolithic files and just filter for the view I want, though many seem to prefer smaller ones (i find it harder to sync more files and directories though, and I’m unsure of the advantages more files provide).

arduinomancer• 7 years ago

Is there any way to use org-mode on mobile? I feel like the best solution would be something where you can take notes on the go too

noobly4• 7 years ago

I use Emacs with Termux on Android. You can use the volume buttons as modifier keys, so it’s not so bad. Other solutions like Orgzly and Beorg exist, but I haven’t tried them personally.

tugberkk• 7 years ago

I know this is not the answer you are looking for, but Microsoft Excel (or a spreadsheet program) can help you with this, except images.

However, notes, quotes, movie names etc. can all be listed in a spreadsheet and can be searched, listed, filtered, etc.

Ask HN: Personal Database Tool?

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