When using files that should be in an accessible file system, quite often I have been in a situation where

• I couldn't find a document by name but remembered attributes like 'document' (unclear which format) with '> 12 pages' and dates from '2011 - 2015'
• I needed to remove a lot of duplicates for sake of saving disk space but as well for cleaning up directory structures
• searching for 'similar' files (where similiar is to be defined by content type)

Therefore, I initiated a project that consists of three elements

• a database that holds not only file attributes stored in a file system, but additional values such as content type, checksum, type-specific characteristics
• a script to manage that database (import, cleanup, ....)
• a frontend to search for documents of interest

See

https://github.com/hrommel/fdb