Nepomuk/FileIndexer
File Indexer
Nepomuk serves as the primary file indexer for the KDE Workspace.
Architecture
With KDE Workspace 4.10, the Nepomuk File Indexer indexes the files in two phases. The first phase, called Basic Indexing, just extracting the filename, modification date, and mimetype. The second phase is responsible for looking inside the file and extracting information such as the Artist, Album and Title.
Startup Scan
On starting the Nepomuk File Indexer, it scans through all the files marked for indexing and checks if they have been modified. This scan on startup may take some amount of time. By default it is not configurable. It can however, be avoided by adding this parameter to the nepomukstrigirc.
[General]
disable initial update=true
This will disable the startup scan of all the indexed files.
File Indexing Errors
Due to bugs and incorrect files one occasionally might encounter files which cannot be indexed. One can log the indexing errors in that case by changing the following parameter in nepomukstrigirc.
[General]
debug mode=true
This will cause all the file errors to be written to the $KDEDIR/share/data/nepomuk/file-indexer-error.log file. You might want to check this file and report the errors by uploading the relevant file and error on bugs.kde.org
File Formats
With the KDE Workspace 4.10 release, we no longer rely on Strigi for file indexing. We now rely on our own home-grown indexer which use libraries already heavily used within KDE.
In 4.10, we support most Image, Video, and Audio formats. We are however lacking in Document Formats and only support PDF. If you can encounter some file which you think has not been indexed, you can manually index it by manually running the following command nepomukindexer fileUrl. Make sure you have Nepomuk debug messages. If the file has been successfully indexed, and Nepomuk has not managed to successfully extract the required information, then please file a bug report with the relevant details.