First off, many thanks for the wonderful implementation of tags in DTPO.
I’m trying to understand their behavior with indexed (as opposed to imported) file databases. From what I can tell, DTPO will read OpenMeta tags when it indexes and file, but doesn’t write a DTPO tag as OpenMeta into a file it has indexed.
Does this sound correct, or have I missed something somewhere?
Happy New Year!
Charles
In PB8, DT writes OpenMeta tags only when File > Export > Files and Folders is used to export. Search the Forum for other discussions on this.
What’s curious about this to me is that when I INDEXED a folder with 2 files in it, DT created and added a tag to both files that was the name of the folder.
When I IMPORTED the folder, this didn’t happen.
I love that DT is capable of pulling in OpenMeta tags from imported files.
What’s next? I hope a decent tag cloud is in the works!
Yes. I’ve read most of the pertinent posts and am aware of this. What I’m trying to confirm is whether, when you tag an indexed file (obviously residing in the file system, and not in a DTPO database) whether the file itself is OpenMeta tagged (it appears not), or only the DTPO index.
A follow-on question is whether such behavior is warranted, and if so, whether it would make an appearance in some future iteration of DTPO.
Best, Charles
As of PB8, tags are not written to the indexed file unless the file is exported with File > Export (in this case a new instance of the file is created - with OM tags).
Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but you might want to make a distinction between the storage of data as X-attributes, and the OpenMeta interface to Spotlight.
It’s perfectly legit to store data as xattrs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your files had such stuff stored there already (use Skim? TextMate?). Spotlight might trash the com.metadata info, but I doubt the org.openmeta is any more prone to destruction than other xattr data. So it’s not a bad place to store tags with the file, and there’s open source code to read and manipulate the data, so it could always be moved when something better comes along. It’s certainly as likely to survive (if not moreso) than DTPO itself.
Best, Charles