Best Ways to Add Text Metadata to Audio/Video Files

DEVONthink Tips
1

I have lots of audio and video clips in my DevonThink database. I’d like to add lengthy text metadata to the clips for searching as well as browsing. As an example, I might add a transcript of a TED talk or a outline with time stamps for a podcast.

Right now, I’m embedding the AV file to a rich text file, but I’m wondering if there is a better way to do this. I have three goals:

  1. Be able to search the text
  2. Be able to read the text as easily as I can read text notes (so the metadata can’t be hidden away in a place that requires extra steps to view)
  3. Easy access to the original AV file for viewing, dragging into another app, etc. This is where the RTF approach is weakest
2

Right now there are two options:

  1. You could import the audio/video files and add comments (see Info pane) which are searchable.
  2. Another possibility is to use the Annotation template (see Data > New from template) which supports also rich text
1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply. Neither of those options does quite what I’m looking for.

  1. The comments field is hard to read while skimming through a bunch of items.

  2. The annotation option creates a second document, making organization a little more challenging. It’s not awful, but it’s also not better than the RTF option.

4

I’m curious what you’d find challenging about it. Also, are you referring to DEVONthink Personal?

5

Nope, I use DTPO.

What’s challenging is that the database has two entries for what I think of as a single logical item (the AV file and the metadata). It’s a paper cut rather than a major issue, but it isn’t as streamlined as I might hope. If I name both the text file and the AV file with logical names and do a title search, I might have both entries show up in a search box, cutting the number of search results I see in half and making skimming harder. If I only give a meaningful name to the text annotations, then I have a bunch of video files with random names and it’s possible to accidentally delete the wrong file.

6

If you are using the Annotation template (see Data > New from Template > Annotation), the name of the file is the same as the referred file, just with (Annotation) appended to it. In a search this provides hits for both documents. The file is also created in the same location as the original, which makes for easy grouping. Also, a smart group for all Annotations is automatically created.

1 Like