Plenty of applications do just this today by using the file system plus an index in SQLite. Is that method insufficient?
Then you answered your own question: "Plenty of applications do just this today".
So yes, it is a common enough case that it could/should be built into the OS.
Photo albums wants to do face recognition. Music player wants BPM detection. Should those be done by OS? I do not think so.
Plenty of applications do just this today by using the file system plus an index in SQLite. Is that method insufficient?