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Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files
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Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files


  • Subject: Re: Adding Spotlight keywords to files
  • From: Vince DeMarco <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 19:47:15 -0700


On Aug 5, 2005, at 6:10 PM, Ben Haller 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.

You can't tag any files right now, you have to write an importer. In the case of image files, you could add a keywork via the IPTC tags etc. when you create the image. (the Image IO library will let you do this)


Vince


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References: 
 >Adding Spotlight keywords to files (From: Ben Haller <email@hidden>)

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