[Moderator] Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files
[Moderator] Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files
- Subject: [Moderator] Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files
- From: Matthew Formica <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 19:07:43 -0700
Ben,
While your question is a good one, it doesn't have to do with Cocoa per se.
There is a spotlight-dev mailing list
<http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/spotlight-dev> where this question
would be more on-topic; you might want to try posting there.
Thanks for your cooperation,
--
Matthew Formica
Cocoa & Dev Tools Technology Evangelist
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations
email@hidden
On 8/5/05 6:10 PM, "Ben Haller" <email@hidden> wrote:
> Hi! I've been poking through developer docs and list archives for
> a while, and I believe this question remains unanswered, although I
> saw it asked a few times by others:
>
> Can an app simply add metadata to an existing file (one it
> creates, even), without being the owner of that file and without
> having an "importer"? If not, is this because there just isn't API
> to do it at the moment, or is this idea in fact contrary to the
> design of Spotlight?
>
> A practical example. I have a screenshot app. It lets the user
> choose what other app will "own" the screenshots it saves; you can
> make them be GraphicConverter files, Photoshop files, Preview files,
> whatever. My app is not itself capable of opening image files at
> all; it can only create them. So obviously my app cannot have a
> Spotlight importer.
> I want my app to tag all the files it creates as being
> "screenshots" by tagging them with a keyword. This would let the
> user quickly and easily find screenshots they had taken, regardless
> of where they had ended up, and that strikes me as useful. If
> Spotlight can't do things like that, I think users will be
> disappointed...
>
> I haven't seen this explicitly stated, but the more I read, the
> more I get the impression that a stake for Spotlight is that the
> metadata for a file must always be able to be regenerated from the
> file's data; metadata can never contain its own unique information,
> it can only hold up a mirror, as it were, to the data already in the
> file. If this is true, then presumably there will never be a way for
> the user to just tag a bunch of files as being "related to project
> XYZ"; if that metadata were lost, there would be no way to recreate
> it, since the files themselves don't know they are part of project
> XYZ. Such a tag would violate the fundamental design of Spotlight.
> Is this correct? If so, it seems like a major, major limitation.
>
> Ben Haller
> Stick Software
>
>
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