TagSpaces

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 801 words

TagSpaces writes your tags into the filename. A photo tagged invoice and 2026 becomes scan[invoice 2026].jpg, and that convention is both the entire product and the thing you have to make peace with before installing it. There is no database, no server-side index and no proprietary format; the tags survive TagSpaces itself, show up in any file manager, and travel with the files through Syncthing, rsync or a USB stick. If you have ever lost a notes app's tags when you exported, that is the argument. If you cannot stand renamed files, stop here and look at Linkding for bookmarks and a proper notes tool for the rest.

Where it sits in a self-hoster's stack

TagSpaces is a desktop application first (Windows, macOS, Linux, built in TypeScript on Electron) and a web edition second. The web edition is a static build you can serve from any web server or the Docker image, and it browses files on an S3-compatible bucket or, with the desktop app, on local folders. Nothing in it needs to run 24 hours a day. In practice the layout that works is: a folder tree that Syncthing keeps identical on every machine, TagSpaces desktop on each of them, and the same files visible to whatever else you already run. Because it stores nothing outside the files (plus, optionally, small .ts sidecar folders for descriptions and thumbnails), it coexists with Joplin, Paperless-ngx or a plain Markdown directory without any of them knowing.

What "no database" buys and costs

The gain is durability. A file system full of [tag] filenames is readable in 20 years without TagSpaces existing. Search is a full walk of the folder, which on a few thousand files is instant and on 200,000 is a wait; the indexing option in the sidecar folders helps but does not turn it into a search engine. There is no server, so there is nothing to back up beyond the files you already back up, and nothing to expose. The cost is that tags are per file, not per fragment; you cannot tag a paragraph, and moving a tagged file into a different structure means either keeping the filename convention or losing the tags.

It is a bookmark manager only in a specific sense

TagSpaces has a browser extension that clips a page and saves it as an HTML file (or a screenshot) into a folder you choose, where it is tagged like everything else. That is a personal archive of pages with tags, searchable offline, and it is a fair replacement for a Raindrop.io collection if what you wanted was "keep a copy of the article". It is not a shared bookmark server: no URL to hand a friend, no browser-sync of a bookmarks bar, no public collections. For those, Linkwarden archives pages server-side with sharing, and Linkding is the tiny option; both live in the bookmarks category alongside TagSpaces.

Free tier versus Pro

The Community edition is AGPL-3.0, at 5,265 GitHub stars, and has been maintained since 2014. It does tagging, search, the file browser, the web clipper and the Markdown, HTML and image viewers. The Pro edition, paid, adds the features that make the tool feel finished: geo-tagging, colour-tagged folders, tag groups synced across machines, advanced search with time ranges, and the S3 object-storage connection that the self-hosted web edition depends on for remote files. The catalogue lists "Pro features are paid" as a con, and it is a real one: the web edition without Pro is a demo more than a tool, and the useful self-hosted setup is the free desktop app plus your own sync.

The tagging workflow takes a fortnight to accept

Renaming files felt wrong to me for the first week. Two things fixed it. Decide a small vocabulary (20 tags is plenty) and use TagSpaces' tag library to apply them by click rather than typing. Then stop caring about the folder structure, because once tags carry the meaning the folders can be flat and by year. People who come from Evernote tend to want a notebook hierarchy and tags at once; TagSpaces works better when you let the tags win.

What I'd do

Use TagSpaces desktop, free edition, on top of a Syncthing-synced folder, as the organiser for scans, PDFs, reference images and clipped articles that do not belong in a notes app. Skip the web edition unless you buy Pro and already have S3-compatible storage. Keep bookmarks that need sharing or a bar in Linkding. Do the 20-tag vocabulary before the first 100 files, and you will have a tagged archive that outlives every app you run it beside.