Tagging, rating folders, files

[fireant]

Hello,

I am looking for a system to put tags,ratings,descriptions... to folders (and possibly files without changing files themselves).
The idea is to have a system that survives folder moves, reinstalls, and will resist years. That most likely means apps that have internal DB are out of the question. So probably the best solution would be to have tags/descriptions written to the folder itself.

I found following thread with Desktop.ini solution:
viewtopic.php?p=58199
This looks like something that would work as it is already integrated into windows and will probably stay there for years to come.

But i have problems finding ways to simply manage those tags. Manually creating Desktop.ini and editing it is tedious and not fast. I am wondering if there is any good solution for tagging and/or can Everything help with this somehow?
Do you have some good solutions yourselves?

[horst.epp]

I use NTFS Streams for Tags and Comments.
This survives file operations from Explorer or 3rd party file managers
as long as NTFS volumes are used.

Everything indexes this streams and I can search for their content in Everything Total Commander and YXplorer.
I can set the content in Total Commander and XYplorer.

[fireant]

Thanks, did not know about NTFS Streams.
Do they survive moving files/folders from one drive to another?
How do you use them with Total Commander? Quick search showed me a NTFS Stream plugin for Total Commander but is very outdated (2009) and x32.
What about network shares when NTFS is on the other side of the network?

But they seem to be for NTFS only. What about network shares when they are on other FSs (ext4, zfs,...)?

[harryray2]

A stream doesn't appear to survive if one compresses the file with 7-zip

[horst.epp]

A stream doesn't appear to survive if one compresses the file with 7-zip

Yes, I use WinRar with the -OS switch for this purpose.

[horst.epp]

Thanks, did not know about NTFS Streams.
Do they survive moving files/folders from one drive to another?
How do you use them with Total Commander? Quick search showed me a NTFS Stream plugin for Total Commander but is very outdated (2009) and x32.
What about network shares when NTFS is on the other side of the network?

But they seem to be for NTFS only. What about network shares when they are on other FSs (ext4, zfs,...)?

NTFS streams are surviving any copy/move operations as long as NTFS formatted volumes are used.
The TC NTFS_diz plugin works perfect, even on Windows 11.
The age of a plugin doesn't say anything about its functionality.
For XYplorer I use a script in its native scripting to set or remove tags.

[fireant]

It would be best to have a system that does not depend on NTFS to function properly.