The thing is, that it won’t index your files again if they are already indexed.
So if they are already indexed, installing kfilemetadata-ffmpegextractor will not add the missing metadata to the index (I think).
You probably should force a re-index, by deleting the index (~/.local/share/baloo/file/), or turning indexing off and then on again.
To restrict the re-index to certain folders, I suppose it’s enough to exclude that folder, and then include it again.
Without.
Then Baloo’s search is not used. Dolphin just uses a plain “grep” in this case I think, as mentioned. It might even exclude non-text files from the search in that case, I don’t know.
Most PDFs I have are work-related, text-based and non-DRM’d. It is those I’m (mildly) interested in content searching.
Well, then you’d definitely should use some sort of indexing for them.
I don’t know whether Baloo fits your needs, but recoll should in any case. Though I never used both. I did enable Baloo’s indexing for some tests, but I never really used it or the search. Recoll I never even installed.
Personally I have no use for that and don’t want to “waste” my harddisk space with a big index…
Other files I only want to search by name.
That should be easily possible, with or without an index. You could even use locate/updatedb for that (there’s even a KIO slave for that… )
AFAIR it integrates with krunner (ALT+F2), so you just have to type the search term in it and it will list, in krunner’s drop-down, the files with excerpts of the relevant content. It’s cool, actually, but can be a bit overwhelming when there are many hits.
As I said, I don’t know it myself.
Apparently it does come with a KRunner plugin then?
You can use the KIO slave (recoll:/ or something) in KRunner as well though, like any other KIO slave.
It seems that sometime between the initial advanced config and indexing, which took a couple of nights, and today, these advanced settings were lost. :/. No idea why.
Well, I cannot tell you why either.
Maybe Baloo did notice that they are in fact the same folders? But then indexing/showing metadata information should work for the symlinks I suppose.
Just an additional remark to your initial problem:
If a file is in a folder that is to be indexed, but the file itself is not in the index yet, no metadata is shown, as Dolphin (or rather the metadata information panel/widget) wants to get the metadata from the index then.
Probably. Excluded files/folders should get removed from the index.
Or is there a way to check the database?
There definitely is, it’s a Xapian database, and the filemap is just SQLite as you can see from the file name.
And you can check whether a file is indexed with the command “balooshow”. “balooctl status” will show you how many files are indexed.