What’s new in Tracker 2.2.2 / 2.3.0 Beta:
- Support for storing Musicbrainz metadata in the multimedia ontology.
- Doc cleanups
- Test suite improvements
- Build fixes
Tracker is an open source command-line software that can crawl through your disk drive, index files and store data to be easily accessible at a later time. It has been specifically engineered for the GNOME desktop environment. The application is known as the default search engine, metadata storage system and search tool for the freely distributed GNOME project. It deeply integrates with the GNOME Shell user interface.
Features at a glance
Its key highlights include thread safety, UTF-8 support, internationalization, documentation, and localization. It also features full text search functionality, with support for case folding, unaccenting, and Unicode normalization, fle notification support, as well as support for numerous file formats. Actually, end users normally don’t even interact with this application when using the GNOME desktop environment, as it runs in the background as a daemon, indexing each new file or installed application.
Integrates with GNOME Shell
When you use the GNOME Shell overview mode to search for a specific file or program, it is actually Tracker that you interact with. It can seach for files, folders, music tracks, music artists, music albums, image files, video files, document files, emails, contacts, software, feeds, bookmarks, and software categories.
Supports a wide range of ontologies
Among the supported ontologies, we can mention XML Schema Document (xsd), Simplified Calendar Ontology (scal), Dublin Core meta-data (dc), Resource Description Framework (rdf), Multimedia Transfer Protocol (mtp), and Tracker specific annotations (tracker). Several Nepomuk and Maemo ontologies are also supported. In addition, the application is known to comply with several desktop technology standards, including D-Bus, XDG, SPARQL, Nepomuk, as well as the thumbnailer, base directory, shared configuration, shared file meta-data and auto-start specification.
Bottom line
All in all, Tracker is a very important component of the GNOME desktop environment. It automatically stores, organizes and categorizes your files, folders and applications, so you can easily find them whenever you want, with a single mouse click.
