Add Metadata to Files via Finder?

[TrenttonY]

What’s the reason for macOS not allowing you add/remove/change the various metadata fields right in the Finder.app?

I would imagine this would be useful to a lot of people.

Does anyone recommend a third-party app to accomplish this?

 

[gilby101]

The reason: There is no single source of file metadata.

Finder does allow you to modify some metadata - e.g. Tags and Finder Comments.

Finder's Get Info > More Info is showing metadata which is (mostly) sourced from within the file - it would not be appropriate for Finder to change this, rather it is the responsibility of the creating application.

Which metadata are you interested in?

 

[gilby101]

You mind find these useful: This from Howard Oakley and the following discussion have more to say about metadata. And an older post about Finder Comments.

He also has two apps xattred and Metamer which are a way to edit some metadata that is stored in extended attributes. These two apps are examples of third party apps which allow add/remove/change of at least some file system metadata.

 

[NoBoMac]

The reason: There is no single source of file metadata.

Very true.

And since no single source, some "magic" happens behind the scenes when a file gets saved, namely, a Spotlight importer gets run to extract and save meta data from a file to Spotlight index.

MDImporter | Apple Developer Documentation

There's never been a better time to develop for Apple platforms.

developer.apple.com

An MDImporter is responsible for returning the metadata containedwith a file. The Spotlight server is notified when a file is changedand loads the appropriate importer to extract the metadata.

Why when you save a Office/Notes/LibreOffice/PDF/etc document and you are able to search for keywords to find a document.

Here's the pathname to the importer for LibreOffice:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/OOoSpotlightImporter.mdimporter