Tessera

Tessera is a command-line and web-based file tagging tool backed by SQLite. It lets you attach arbitrary tags — including typed key=value pairs — to any file on your filesystem, then query those tags to find, organise, or generate views of your collection.

What Tessera does

• Tag anything — images, videos, documents, archives, music, or any other file. Tags live in a small SQLite database (.tessera/db.sqlite3) alongside your files, not in the files themselves.
• Key=value tags — a tag is either a plain word (genre) or a typed pair (year=2024, rating=5). Values support numeric comparisons in queries.
• Query language — find files with boolean expressions: genre/rock and year>=2020 and not live.
• Symlink views — materialise a query result as a folder of symlinks, ready to hand to any other tool.
• Linked databases — split a large collection across multiple directories, each with its own database, and query them together.
• Web interface — a local web app with a file browser, tag editor, thumbnail previews, AI-assisted tagging, and semantic search.
• Cross-platform — macOS and Linux.

About this guide

This guide covers everyday use of Tessera: the CLI, the web interface, and the reference material you need to get the most out of the query language and settings.

Architecture and internal design are documented separately in the filetag-blueprint repository.