It would be very useful if one was allowed to manually add metadata to a file in Devonthink. If it is already possible, please tell me how. And if not, I hope it can be a feature in the future.
Best, Dino
that’s not yet possible but planned for a future release.
Thanks, I understand if you cannot say anything about a date, but I would like to know if it is in the near future?, since I have approximately 5.000 files who needs that kind of data added manually.
Best, Dino
That depends on the definition of “near future” 
But not within the next few weeks and months.
You can use the annotation template to quickly create a note that links back to the original doc, and add any metadata there. The original document will also point to the annotation. If most of the metadata is the same, or you have certain kinds of metadata that you’ll reuse a lot (which is likely), then you might consider creating a new template that has the metadata fields already prepared. This could be in a list, a table, or whatever format you want.
My experience with DT has been that it offers a lot out of the box, but it can’t anticipate specific workflows. So you have to do a bit of thinking and experimenting and setting up to make it really straightforward and efficient for you.
Of course, I’m not saying that custom metadata directly on documents isn’t nice But since DT doesn’t support that yet, you’ll have to do something else. And you may be surprised at how much you like the RTF-note-as-metadata approach because it is so flexible.
Thanks both of you, I think I might end up using a combination of tags and of templates with annotations to manually classify my files.
Nevertheless, I have found out that it is in deed possible to add metadata manually! I can do that in tools/view properties. Now, my problem is that I only have a few predetermined categories to choose between when I want to add my data. The categories are: “Author”, “Company”, “Copyright”, “title”, “subject”, “keywords”, and “comments”. It’s strange, because in “view/columns” you can specify which ‘catatories’ you want to see, and I would like to add data into some of the categories mentioned, such as e.g. “by date added”, “by from”, “by recepient”, “by description”, etc.
Is it somehow possible to add metadata to these categories? I would prefer that solution.
Dino
I believe you will quickly become frustrated trying to add your own metadata via Tools>Show Properties… Not all filetypes support this, and some filetypes support more fields than others. As example, you can edit all the fields of a RTF document, but only the Author, Title, Subject, and Keywords of a PDF document. My experience is that many filetypes do not allow you to edit any of the fields.
Some of the fields that you mention, such as ‘by from’ and ‘by recipient’ are unique to imported email documents.