cannot change or set emblems

[[e-mail]]

Upgraded Ubuntu from 11.04 to 11.10 today and the emblems tab in the sidebar disappeared. I can still see emblems on my files but there is no way to modify them now.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.2.0-0ubuntu5
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 14 03:33:17 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-13 (0 days ago)

[[e-mail] (ubuntu-allefant)]

Since I depend on emblems, I'm working around the issue with this Nautilus extension for now:
https://github.com/allefant/Nautilus-Emblems-Menu-Extension/blob/master/nautilus_emblems_menu.py

Still hope it is fixed properly soon.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Roman Yagodin (roman-yagodin)]

It's not a "bug", according to this source:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2010-July/msg00023.html

Besides, background and emblems (especially emblems!) was a nice and very useful feature of Nautilus - and NOT "quite old and crufty", "not really useful", "a legacy feature", as authors of Nautilus 3 may think. And the promise of "We will keep to investigate a more powerful and up-to-date metadata/keyword integration for nautilus in the future anyway." - is not a good reason to broke things worked for years, anyway.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, as pointed before it's a GNOME design decision and not a bug

[Mannex (russ-mannex)]

.... which is why some people (myself included) have opted to dump Nautilus and move to other file managers, such as xfe and dolphin.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Mannex, good for you, whatever softwares preferences you have is not really something to discuss on a bug tracker though

[[e-mail] (ubuntu-allefant)]

Well, the Ubuntu upgrade caused me to lose access to an important tool (apparently not because of a bug but on purpose, so all the worse) - so I think this is a good place to mention solutions.

However XFE does not seem to have any way to modify metadata. And Dolphin has metadata but does not seem to support emblems. So not really alternatives.

The best alternative I found is Thunar. Even transferring the Nautilus metadata (can query them with gvfs) to Thunar (can set them with tdbtool) is not too difficult. So if someone has the same problem and finds this bug report, two viable work-arounds are:

- Stay with Nautilus and use a plugin like the one above until they restore the functionality.
- Switch to Thunar.

[Mannex (russ-mannex)]

Thanks Allefant. My problem with Nautilus was a little different, but I'll take a look at Thunar as well.

[Marcelo Lotif (mlotifjava)]

thank you for the extension, allefant! now I can change my emblems just fine... maybe with a little tweaking this solution could be better than what we have before haha thanks... let's hope for someone to fix this.