10.04: file searches and categorization

[temporos]

I have a large number of documents (images, music, OpenOffice, etc.) in various directories in my home folder. For the most part, it is organized so I can find the documents I need relatively quickly. However, is there a way to search for documents using more than their file name? That is, is there a way to search for, say, "Artist X" and have all music, documents, and images by "Artist X" appear in the results list?

Similarly, I have background images of, for example, Super Mario Bros. that are drawn by various artists. How can I search for "Super Mario Bros" and have the search return all the relevant images, since they're in directories organized by artists?

Essentially, I'm looking for a way to search for general documents in the same way I would search for an image in F-Spot. Does such a way exist?

[2F4U]

There are search and indexing applications such as zeitgeist, tracker or akonadi/strigi (only KDE) available, which are supposed to provide such a functionality. As far as I know, zeitgeist is included in Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity while akonadi/strigi are part of Kubuntu. I don't know how good these are since I try to avoid this kind of functionality.

[temporos]

I plan to stick with Lucid for a while. I've tried Tracker and Zeitgeist, but both of those are extremely buggy, and they both started to wreak havoc on my file systems before I uninstalled them.

Are there any other suggestions? My problem is that, for example, I have several pictures with Mario, several with Luigi, etc. Some of these pictures have multiple characters in them, and the name of the file is the title of the picture, not necessarily who's in it. I'd like a way to search for "Mario" and have all files tagged with Mario appear, regardless of the file name.

[Lars Noodén]

There are Recoll and Pinot to consider besides Tracker and Strigi mentioned above.

[temporos]

How are those in terms of bugginess and system stability? I had a monstrous mess of my file system to clean up after Tracker and Zeitgeist were done playing with it.