Synopsis

metaindex [-h] [--list] [-l loglevel] [-c configuration file] {find,index,fs}

With metaindex you can find files on your disk based on their metadata, like the title of a PDF, the keywords of an ebook, or the model of a camera that a photo was taken with.

The following types of files are supported by default:

• Images (anything that has EXIF, IPTC, or XMP information),

• Audio (audio file formats that have ID3 header or similar),

• Video (most video file formats have an ID3 header),

• PDF,

• ebooks (epub natively, calibre metadata files are understood, too).

More file types can be supported through the use of addons.

User provided extra metadata is supported, if it’s provided in the same directory as the file and the metadata file is .metadata.json.

Options

General parameters are:

-c configuration file

Use this configuration file instead of the one from the default location.

-h

Show the help.

-l loglevel

Set the level of details shown in logging. Your options are fatal, error, warning, info, and debug. Defaults to warning.

--list

List all available indexers and exit.

metaindex operates in one of the modes index or find.

If you want to try the experimental filesystem mode, there is also fs.

Find

This is the main operation used to search for files:

metaindex find [-l directory] [-f [-k]] [-t [tags]] [--] [search queries]

The options to this command are

-t [tags]

Metadata tags that you wish to see per found file.

-l directory

If this option is provided, metaindex will create this directory (or use the existing directory only if it is empty) and create a symbolic link to all files that matches this search.

-f

Enforce the use of -l’s directory, even if it is not empty. Still, metaindex will only work with that directory if it contains only symbolic links (e.g. a previous search result)! If -f is provided, all symbolic links in directory will be deleted and the links of this search will be put in place.

-k

When you use -l and -f, -k will keep all existing links in the search directory. That means you can accumulate search results in one directory.

search queries

The terms to search for. If left empty, all files will be found. See below in section search query syntax for the details on search queries. If the search query is only given as -, metaindex will read the search query from stdin.

Index

This is the operation to index files and store that information in the cache:

metaindex index [-C] [-r] [-p processes] [-i [paths]]

The options to this command are

-C

Clear the cache. If combined with other options, the flushing of the cache will happen first.

-m

Remove missing files. When a file, that’s in the index, can not be found on disk anymore, it will be removed when this option is enabled. By default this option is disabled.

-i [paths]

Run the indexer on these paths. If no paths are provided, all paths in the cache are revisited and checked for changes. If paths is -, the list of files will be read from stdin, one file per line.

-p processes

By default metaindex will run as many indexer processes in parallel as CPUs are available on the computer. This parameter allows you to define how many indexers may be run at the same time.

-r

Run the indexer recursively. That means to visit all files in all subdirectories of the paths in the -i parameter.

Filesystem (fs)

On Linux you can try the experimental feature of mounting a FuseFS that will give you a structured access to your files through their metadata:

metaindex fs [command] [mount point]

The only supported command so far is mount.

It is very experimental and not very useful, but at the same time will not break any of your files as it only provides a read-only view on your tagged files.