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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