KDE 4.13.1 Dolphin Information Panel, No Meta Data

**Dragon32** · 17-May-2014, 03:41

Hi All,

I finally got around to giving KDE 4.13 a spin after all the Baloo stuff died down but after going from 4.12 to 4.13.1 I've noticed that there is no meta data displayed in the dolphin information panel for any file type, e.g. MP3, JPG or video files etc. Is this how the information panel is now or am I missing something ? Any help appreciated.

Thanks

**tannington** · 17-May-2014, 05:39

Originally Posted by Dragon32

Hi All,

I finally got around to giving KDE 4.13 a spin after all the Baloo stuff died down but after going from 4.12 to 4.13.1 I've noticed that there is no meta data displayed in the dolphin information panel for any file type, e.g. MP3, JPG or video files etc. Is this how the information panel is now or am I missing something ? Any help appreciated.

Thanks

The Information Panel is now, unfortunately, reliant upon baloowidgets...

As, it seems, numerous parts of KDE are. Sigh!!

**wolfi323** · 17-May-2014, 05:57

Originally Posted by tannington

The Information Panel is now, unfortunately, reliant upon baloowidgets...

As, it seems, numerous parts of KDE are. Sigh!!

It requires libbaloowidgets, true. But it shouldn't need the file indexer enabled.

Before that it was reliant on nepomukcore (and even part of that package) and nepomukwidgets. And before that it needed strigi.
So no change there.

It doesn't work here though even with the file indexer enabled, so there seems to be a bug.

PS: It does work for indexed files. But for some reasons I don't have any files indexed anymore (since upgrading to 4.13.1?).
Anyway, it is still a bug. The information should be shown for not-indexed files as well, just like it was with Nepomuk.

**wolfi323** · 17-May-2014, 06:23

For the record:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334931 (filed by Dragon32, thank you for that!)

**Dragon32** · 17-May-2014, 06:23

Thanks for the reply folks. Thought it might be a bug or developers omission. It's back to 2009 again when Nepomuk first came out and meta data was removed for non indexed files :

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=62458

Sigh, getting tired of this whole Nepomuk/Baloo business and I'm seriously considering kicking KDE into touch for another desktop environment. Anyhow bug report filed at KDE:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334931

**tannington** · 18-May-2014, 08:49

Originally Posted by wolfi323

It requires libbaloowidgets, true. But it shouldn't need the file indexer enabled.

Before that it was reliant on nepomukcore (and even part of that package) and nepomukwidgets. And before that it needed strigi.
So no change there.

It doesn't work here though even with the file indexer enabled, so there seems to be a bug.

PS: It does work for indexed files. But for some reasons I don't have any files indexed anymore (since upgrading to 4.13.1?).
Anyway, it is still a bug. The information should be shown for not-indexed files as well, just like it was with Nepomuk.

I'm sorry to say that IMHO baloo has, how shall I say, 'multiple issues'... Considering it is, I believe, little more than 'nepomuk with a new name' but now using xapian as the database; I'm surprised at just how buggy it is... Vishesh has probably put an enormous amount of effort into this, but I for one don't like the direction in which he's heading. His choice of 'on by default' has won him few friends either.

At least nepomuk could be disabled, baloo looks to me as if it's becoming more deeply embedded within KDE and is beginning to become quite intrusive - probably best left for a new thread in 'soapbox'...

**wolfi323** · 18-May-2014, 09:06

Originally Posted by tannington

I'm sorry to say that IMHO baloo has, how shall I say, 'multiple issues'... Considering it is, I believe, little more than 'nepomuk with a new name' but now using xapian as the database;

That's correct AFAIK.

Vishesh has probably put an enormous amount of effort into this, but I for one don't like the direction in which he's heading. His choice of 'on by default' has won him few friends either.

Well, nepomuk was _enabled_ by default as well already, even the file indexing.
It was an openSUSE specific change to disable the file indexing by default. I don't know what other distributions did in this regard though.

At least nepomuk could be disabled, baloo looks to me as if it's becoming more deeply embedded within KDE and is beginning to become quite intrusive - probably best left for a new thread in 'soapbox'...

Again, this has not changed at all with baloo. It's exactly the same as it was with nepomuk. The only difference is that nepomuk had separate "nepomukserver" and "virtuoso" processes that had to be running all the time. It was this that you have been able to turn off in addition to disabling the file indexer. But baloo doesn't have this anyway.
Otherwise not much has changed except for the storage.

Baloo file indexing can be disabled, just like it was with Nepomuk, and it now (4.13.1) even has an on/off switch in its configuration module.
And there's the advanced module as well as you know.

**tannington** · 18-May-2014, 09:47

Originally Posted by wolfi323

... Again, this has not changed at all with baloo. It's exactly the same as it was with nepomuk. ...

Sorry wolfi, I find it difficult to agree with you there

Yes, baloo can be (mostly, barring a few bugs) disabled with regard to the content, or phase two, indexing. However meta-data is still extracted from files and stored in the database. With nepomuk one could disable that also, if that's available with baloo then the option is well hidden and I've yet to discover it!

And there's the advanced module as well as you know.

I'm aware of that but haven't looked into it - is that not just a GUI for the settings that are in what is now 'baloofilerc', which looks from memory at least, much the same as the old nepomuk version.

From a personal point of view, I would much prefer to have full control (to the extent of removing all baloo components if I so chose), over an indexers behaviour; be that baloo or any other.

Basically it comes down to something which is fundamentally simple: If I don't want indexing of file content, meta-data, e-mail, or indeed file names; then I should be able to disable that. At present, with baloo, that is *not* possible.

I genuinely hope developers are taking note of some of the criticism of baloo's implementation, a lot of which I feel is justified. How many end-users for example know that data is also written to the extended attribute user namespace. At the moment I'm aware of baloo.rating, xdg.tags and xdg.comments - user beware! Your 'comments' may not be as private as you thought they were.

**wolfi323** · 18-May-2014, 10:20

Originally Posted by tannington

Yes, baloo can be (mostly, barring a few bugs) disabled with regard to the content, or phase two, indexing. However meta-data is still extracted from files and stored in the database.

Is it? That would be a bug I'd say.
But I haven't tried to turn it off yet.

What metadata do you mean, actually? In phase 1 it only stores filesize and such AFAIK. But I guess it shouldn't do that neither when disabled.

OTOH, since this thread is about the _missing_ metadata: it didn't store _any_ metadata for non-indexed files in the database here (unless I called baloo_file_indexer manually). Not even for the files that should be indexed, when I wanted to display the metadata in dolphin. And it still hasn't reindexed all my files.

Again, with Nepomuk one could disable the nepomukserver and virtuoso (the database) running, but those don't exist anymore with baloo.
I have to admit though that I don't know all the details about Nepomuk/baloo either.

I'm aware of that but haven't looked into it - is that not just a GUI for the settings that are in what is now 'baloofilerc', which looks from memory at least, much the same as the old nepomuk version.

Yes. And it already respected those settings in 4.13.0. It even migrated my Nepomuk settings from nepomukfilerc automatically.

From a personal point of view, I would much prefer to have full control (to the extent of removing all baloo components if I so chose), over an indexers behaviour; be that baloo or any other.

You can disable the file indexer in baloo's settings module.
You can disable the akonadi indexer in Akonadikonsole I think. At least you can disable mail indexing per mail folder in KMail (again, exactly as it was with Nepomuk).
And you can uninstall baloo-file or baloo-pim to completely disable the corresponding indexers. (this was _not_ possible with Nepomuk)

Basically it comes down to something which is fundamentally simple: If I don't want indexing of file content, meta-data, e-mail, or indeed file names; then I should be able to disable that. At present, with baloo, that is *not* possible.

See above.
As last resort you can just uninstall the indexers, at least on openSUSE.

I genuinely hope developers are taking note of some of the criticism of baloo's implementation, a lot of which I feel is justified. How many end-users for example know that data is also written to the extended attribute user namespace. At the moment I'm aware of baloo.rating, xdg.tags and xdg.comments - user beware! Your 'comments' may not be as private as you thought they were.

Yes, baloo saves the tags and so on in extended attributes. This of course has advantages and disadvantages. And there was a long discussion going on about that on the KDE developer mailinglists before baloo was released, but it was agreed upon doing it that way in the end.
If you copy/move your files to a FAT partition or upload them somewhere those get lost anyway.

Well, I'm not trying to defend Baloo here. I never used Nepomuk (I had it enabled though, just disabled the file indexer), and I haven't used baloo either yet. I do still have the indexer enabled, but for some reason it forgot all my indexed files after updating to 4.13.1 and doesn't really seem to index them by itself anymore. (I have filed a bug report about this)
OTOH, I didn't even notice baloo indexing everything after updating to 4.13.0. It didn't really have any negative impact on my system. (I did exclude some folders during Nepomuk times already, although I had the file indexer disabled)

It's just that I don't really want to "waste" 1GiB hard disk space for a feature I'm not using anyway, so I guess I'm going to disable it again sooner or later.

But I guess I'm getting off-topic here now...

**tannington** · 18-May-2014, 11:38

Originally Posted by wolfi323

What metadata do you mean, actually?

It appears --- anything it can extract; depending upon file type.
And... ( bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332610 ) it likes drawing your attention to it.

As last resort you can just uninstall the indexers, at least on openSUSE.

rm -rf ~/.local/share/baloo/*
chmod 1000 ~/.local/share/baloo

and it's not bothered me since...

If you copy/move your files to a FAT partition or upload them somewhere those get lost anyway.

Just don't give an ext4 formatted memory card / usb stick to your mate...

As I said, user beware.

But I guess I'm getting off-topic here now...

Think we both are... Hopefully baloo will 'mature'. One thing I do know though, I won't be going back to it.

Make the most of what's left of the weekend.