Re: New Spotlight Info
Re: New Spotlight Info
- Subject: Re: New Spotlight Info
- From: Jonathon Mah <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 19:58:06 +1030
On 9 Nov 2004, at 11:53, Wade Tregaskis wrote:
More on topic, though, and still heading down the meta-data track...
all this indexed meta-data that Spotlight has; how tightly coupled is
it to the original file? Will it easily survive movement of the file,
on the same volume or to another? Is there support for delta-updates,
i.e. modifying only some of the existing meta-data when the file is
updated, rather than generating it again from scratch?
There is no new special "metadata" fork or whatever. Spotlight works by
having importer plug-ins extract metadata from normal files, in exactly
the same way iTunes extracts the album, artist, etc. from the ID3 tags,
or iPhoto examines EXIF tags. Spotlight is 'simply' a way of
centralizing all this data.
To re-iterate, the metadata of an MP3 _is_ the contents of the ID3
tags, which is in the data fork. The metadata of a JPEG is the EXIF
portion, which is in the data fork. The metadata of your document type
is in the document binary file, or the document package, or stored with
the other data in your XML document, or whatever. A Spotlight importer
of the appropriate type (e.g. JPEG, MP3, etc.) is passed a file and
asked to return the metadata in a standard way. For your document type,
_you_ must write an importer that takes your document and gives back to
Spotlight a CFDictionary (IIRC) of metadata attributes.
Jonathon Mah
email@hidden
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