I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year from Manjaro KDE. One feature that KDE had is that you could write a comment on any file by clicking Properties and going to the metadata. I assumed that this wrote the comment into the metadata of every file and that this would translate over to other distributions, but it doesn’t appear to be the case.
I found this old thread from 2012 which said that KDE stores it’s comments in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/. If that’s still true today, I’m really worried now that all of that comment data I spent hours writing has been deleted along with Manjaro, because I had no idea that the data wasn’t store inside the file itself, since it was always listed with the rest of the metadata for every file in it’s properties. Is there no hope of me getting these comments back, or is there some way?
Update: Despite what that old thread seemed to imply, it turns out the comments do in fact get stored in metadata. After getting help in the comments, I found the easiest solution was to simply install Dolphin (KDE’s file manager) into Pop!_OS, which allowed me to view the comments just as they were when I used KDE. For future readers, some other options that I didn’t try that probably also work are:
- Load a Linux distro using KDE into a virtual machine on top of Pop!_OS and view comments that way
- Flash a distro like KDE Neon onto a live USB and view the comments that way
- Use the command
getfattr FILENAME -n user.xdg.commentto view the comment data within the Pop! terminal (I didn’t get this working, but this was suggested to me)
If that comment is true and you don’t have the database anymore then there’s no hope.
If you were writing comments to understand which file is which then consider a directory scheme for sorting your files and add readme.md files in a narrow category of files to describe them. I do something like: All coding projects go into home/code, each project has a readme. Etc.
If you were just logging for history purposes ie good memories in photos I’d suggest just making a markdown gallery. Or something similar.
Yes, I was mainly using it for photos and videos. I wrote a lot of text in old photos from when I was a very young child or baby in order to record as many memories I still have in relation to them as possible, so these comments mean a lot.
Unfortunately I’m afraid they’re lost (I think).
There’s some alternatives if you’re willing to continue with that:
Aves Gallery on android (is on fdroid) can embed comments into image long term metadata. But I have not tested it after transfer.
Creating a directory Gallery with markdown files and a subdir for all images and then writing comments inside those markdown files with a link to the local image. Very simple to do with Obsidian or similar markdown-powered software.
And probably more that I’m not aware of myself.
Only lost if the files got moved to another filesystem as it turned out they are actually stored inside file metadata.
Great, then they might be recoverable.