Metadata - the killer App I hope Leopard has
Since this is TI, I'm going to throw out here something that I desperately hope we see tomorrow: a simple way to easily add metadata to files.
What it would need to have:
1) A good GUI
2) The ability to add tags to files based on criteria such as name, date, location, etc.
3) Integration with Mail, Preview, etc.
Why:
Metadata is literally "Data about data". It's a set of tags about a file, seamlessly embedded in the file. With the new Spotlight supporting more complex searches in the UI, this would be amazing. Currently, metadata is a pain in the ass to put into a lot of files. Sure, the payoff is astonishing, but it would take hours and hours, whereas iTag.app could reduce that to minutes.
Payoff:
With iTag, I could easily put invisible labels on files in (for example) my ~/School/ECE200 folder. Then whenever I need to find something, I could limit it to just those files tagged "ECE200", regardless of where I later move them. If I could label every game I have as a game and then by genre, a simple search or smart folder will list them all. Or by tagging all the files in a project by their purpose and the project name, I'd have an easy way to assemble all the files from one project, and all the files of a certain type for example purposes.
Just a crazy idea I had. I think it would be the perfect app for Leopard, and would compliment the new and old features we already know about. Thoughts?
What it would need to have:
1) A good GUI
2) The ability to add tags to files based on criteria such as name, date, location, etc.
3) Integration with Mail, Preview, etc.
Why:
Metadata is literally "Data about data". It's a set of tags about a file, seamlessly embedded in the file. With the new Spotlight supporting more complex searches in the UI, this would be amazing. Currently, metadata is a pain in the ass to put into a lot of files. Sure, the payoff is astonishing, but it would take hours and hours, whereas iTag.app could reduce that to minutes.
Payoff:
With iTag, I could easily put invisible labels on files in (for example) my ~/School/ECE200 folder. Then whenever I need to find something, I could limit it to just those files tagged "ECE200", regardless of where I later move them. If I could label every game I have as a game and then by genre, a simple search or smart folder will list them all. Or by tagging all the files in a project by their purpose and the project name, I'd have an easy way to assemble all the files from one project, and all the files of a certain type for example purposes.
Just a crazy idea I had. I think it would be the perfect app for Leopard, and would compliment the new and old features we already know about. Thoughts?
Comments
Let me restate...ACCURATE metadata is an enabling yada yada yada...
Vinea
I agree completely. Not only that but I really really hope that Apple rethinks where they store metadata. It needs to be at the file level, not in some database.
AMEN!
I agree completely. Not only that but I really really hope that Apple rethinks where they store metadata. It needs to be at the file level, not in some database.
Why not both?!?! Kinda like Spotlight (I would think) the data (in this case metadata) resides at the file level but is then indexed into a very fast database for speed of searching. Having metadata at the file level without a database would be painful at best. Imagine having a volume of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands over a million files on it (insert porn hound joke) - doing a search over that many individual files (without the aid of a DB) would be sluggish at best. (I would think)
Dave
Why not both?!?! Kinda like Spotlight (I would think) the data (in this case metadata) resides at the file level but is then indexed into a very fast database for speed of searching. Having metadata at the file level without a database would be painful at best. Imagine having a volume of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands over a million files on it (insert porn hound joke) - doing a search over that many individual files (without the aid of a DB) would be sluggish at best. (I would think)
Dave
Of course, I agree it should also be in the spotlight database. I should have clarified that. I just want my files to keep their metadata if they are used on different systems. Also, nobody should have to waste their time creating all this information when it could all be lost with a single corrupted file. I know Apple doesn't do it because it is more time consuming to save the data in each file compared to saving in the spotlight database but I am sure they can find a way to make it a background process.
A possible scenario: You tag a bunch of images. Spotlight immediately updates it's index then spawns a daemon which waits for a lull in use. At that point it writes the new metadata into the IPTC fields of each file that's been updated. This could be done at the application level (iphoto, aperture) as Microsoft is doing now with Vista but it would be more useful at the file system level.
Here's an interesting article (to me) about this subject in Vista: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/20...16/702780.aspx
"Although you?re able to tag thousands of photos and move on immediately, the reality is that those files will slowly be updated in the background. If you have tagged a bunch of files, those tags will not be visible to other applications until the Gallery has finished writing to those files. There is a small indicator in the bottom left hand corner of the application to let you know what the Gallery's metadata read/write status is."
Apple should borrow this idea from Microsoft but execute it in their own, more elegant, way. Metadata should not be proprietary. Microsoft understands this. Apple, so far, appears not to.