metaindex 1.4.0

Utilities to tag files

metaindex

metaindex allows you to find files based on metadata information.

For example, if you want to find all pictures that are have a certain width, you could do this:

metaindex find mimetype:image resolution:1200x

The following file formats are supported out of the box (although they might need additional python packages, see <#Installation>):

• images (png, jpg, etc.; whatever is supported by Pillow)
• audio (mp3, m4a, ogg, etc.; whatever is supported by mutagen)
• OpenDocument (odt, ods, etc.)
• Office Open XML (docx, pptx, xlsx)
• pdf
• html
• epub
• abc music notation
• cbz (through ComicInfo.xml)
• gpx

Installation

To install metaindex either install it directly through pypi:

pip install metaindex

Or clone the repository and install that then through pip:

git clone https://github.com/vonshednob/metaindex
cd metaindex
pip install .

Most modules are optional. If you, for example, want to use metaindex for audio files and PDFs, you will have to install it like this:

pip install metaindex[pdf,audio]

or, for the cloned repository:

pip install .[pdf,audio]

These modules exist for indexing:

• pdf, for PDF files,
• audio, any type of audio/music file,
• image, any type of image file,
• video, any type of video file (overlaps somewhat with audio),
• ebook, ebooks and comic book formats,
• xdg, support for XDG (if you use Linux, just add it),
• yaml, extra metadata in YAML format,
• ocr, find and extract text from images with tesseract (you must have tesseract installed for this to work).

In case you just want everything, this is your install command:

pip install .[all]

There is also an experimental FuseFS filesystem. To be able to use it, you will have to specify fuse as an additional module:

pip install .[all,fuse]

Usage

Before you can use metaindex to search for files, you have to initialize the cache by telling it where your files to index are, for example:

metaindex index --recursive --index ~/Pictures

Afterwards you can start searching for files by metadata, like this:

metaindex find 

Searching

Search queries for use with metaindex find allow you to search

• for files that have a metadata tag: metaindex find resolution?
• for files that have a metadata tag with a certain value: metaindex find title:"dude, where is my car"
• for files that have any metadata tag with a certain value: metaindex find "just anything"

Each value that you provide is actually a case insensitive regular expression.

Usage from Python

To use the metaindex infrastructure from Python, you should instantiate a Cache (you should use MemoryCache though to get the best performance; all three classes, Cache, ThreadedCache, and MemoryCache provide the same interface) and run queries against it (with find).

Cache.find will return an iterable of Cache.Entry instances, consisting of

• path, the location in the file system where that file was last seen
• metadata, a multidict of all metadata
• last_modified, the timestamp when the file was last modified on disk (to the knowledge of the cache)

To use the user's preferences, it's a good idea to load their configuration. Here's an example snippet that'll do both things:

from metaindex.configuration import load
from metaindex.cache import MemoryCache

config = load()
cache = MemoryCache(config)

# memory cache can load in the background, so before the *first* query
# you could consider waiting for it to load all entries
cache.wait_for_reload()

searchquery = 'mimetype:image title?'

for entry in cache.find(searchquery):
    print(entry.path)