File metadata display in Windows/File Explorer

"Ken Springer" wrote

| 1 of the other 9 is Date Acquired. On the face of it, I'd say that
| would refer to a scanner. But, can we trust it?
|
| This is why I am looking for definitions of all of this. It's obvious
| that MS doesn't care.
|

There's a lot that they don't officially document. In this
case I can find official docs about the basic file properties,
but not the rest. I have MSDN docs from '98 and Win7 era.
Both list the same 4-5 file properties available. Yet in XP
it's 35 properties and in Win7+ it goes into the hundreds.
Those seem to be unofficial.

And they keep changing which numbers align with what
attributes, as you can see from the list. Even that list,
without explanations, is a matter of hearsay rather than
official docs. You should be able to work it out for
what you need, but I doubt you'll find clear, complete
docs.

If you really get motivated you could edit the EXIF tags
in a JPG, then return them, and thereby align the Microsoft
versions with the EXIF versions. But I think most of it is
self-explanatory. At least as far as EXIF tags go. Things like
"DateAcquired" and "DateArchived" don't seem to be EXIF
tags. So the first question would be what those properties
even apply to. They could even be unused values reserved
for possible future use. They could be for scanner images,
sure. It looks to me more like some kind of recordkeeping
data.

Look he

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...=vs.85%29.aspx

Interesting. It's .Net docs and doesn't explain at all that
it actually comes from Shell. That says DateAcquired is
a value set by a music download service, to record when
you bought a song.
So I guess you could also figure these things out by
searching that way. But as you can see from that page and
the related links, MS is not oging to make it easy. Docs
like those are the kind of thing you have to already
understand in order to understand them.

My guess is that most of this is semi-experimental. MS
have never really bothered to make the data clearly
accessible in a useful way. It looks to me like a sort
of half-finished project that may eventually be finished
or may get dropped. As long as it's not officially
documented they offer no help and no apologies to
anyone who wants to fiddle around with it.

DateAcquired is a good example. Music services are supposed
to set the date when you download? That's rather silly.
And who's going to try to read it? Who buys music downloads
anymore, for that matter?

There's a surprising amount of that kind of thing in
Windows. Registry settings that are poorly documented
or not at all. (I've found some of them by doing things
like starting IE with RegMon running to see what Registry
values IE reads.)

The display of folders is another case. MS provide no
official docs. Their attitude is that it's none of your
business. Yet the system has been broken in pretty
much every Windows version. In WinME, icons used to
slide off into the corner of folders. On XP there's no way
to get folder windows to stick to a selected size. In figuring
out how to fix that I discovered that the whole system
was broken: Explorer records the settings for every folder,
but does it wrong and, as a result, rejects those settings
next time the folder is opened! Win7 has similar but
different problems. And MS completely switched around
the Registry system for recording folder settings in 7.
Someone spent a lot of time discombobulating the whole
system, apparently for no other reason than to break
it, so that anyone tweaking XP would be thwarted on
Win7. It's nuts.

When you get down to the nitty gritty it's amazing
how much of Windows is random, mixed up, poorly
designed or just downright batty. Like a complex machine
designed by committee. Fortunately, they're very good
about making sure that officially documented things
don't break. That's one way that Windows is far superior
to Linux or Mac. I can write highly functional software
that runs dependably on anything from Win98 to Win10,
as long as I stick to the official API. On Mac you're lucky
if 3 year old software can still be used. On Linux it's
more like a 6-12 month support cycle. But Microsoft
caters to business. Businesses write their own software.
The won't update the OS if it breaks their software.

But I can see why you'd like Macs. They do a beautiful
job. (Except for those obnoxious kiddie icons.) I think of it
like a sports car. With Mac you put on your white dress
shorts, get into your sports car, and drive along the coast,
feeling the wind in your hair. Fun. Feels hip. Windows is
more like a pickup truck. Customizable, flexible, a workhorse.
Great for picking up lumber or grass seed, which won't fit
in your sports car. But it's only fun if you think tinkering is
fun. Your sports car won't even hold a bag of groceries,
but who cares? You'll stop at a cliffside, hipster cafe if
you get hungry. Mac people don't cook. And the bottom
line is that no one ever got laid flashing a Dell laptop
around at Starbucks.

On 2/24/18 9:45 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| 1 of the other 9 is Date Acquired. On the face of it, I'd say that
| would refer to a scanner. But, can we trust it?
|
| This is why I am looking for definitions of all of this. It's obvious
| that MS doesn't care.
|

There's a lot that they don't officially document. In this
case I can find official docs about the basic file properties,
but not the rest. I have MSDN docs from '98 and Win7 era.
Both list the same 4-5 file properties available. Yet in XP
it's 35 properties and in Win7+ it goes into the hundreds.
Those seem to be unofficial.

And they keep changing which numbers align with what
attributes, as you can see from the list. Even that list,
without explanations, is a matter of hearsay rather than
official docs. You should be able to work it out for
what you need, but I doubt you'll find clear, complete
docs.

I wonder, if the lack of documentation here may not be indicative of the
practices of MS in other areas, and possibly leads to the OS being so
unsafe.

I suspect I'll have to do some specific testing for just the columns
that interest me at the time. Perhaps creating a folder of a variety of
files, then displaying all the columns that have "Date" attached to
them, and see what comes up.

I need to go back and find the post from you or Paul about what data
travels "off disk". Notably, the Date Modified column. There is no
info with that name in the EXIF list provided by Irfanview. But, that
info appears to travel "off-disk" from Windows to my Mac. :-)

I may have to install ExifTool, and get the whole "shebang". LOL

At this point in time, I don't need to go too far afield with this
search, since there appears to be nothing comprehensive. At the base,
the core, is I want to find out which columns may have an overall value
to a user when displayed in Explorer. Just a list for the average user.

If you really get motivated you could edit the EXIF tags
in a JPG, then return them, and thereby align the Microsoft
versions with the EXIF versions. But I think most of it is
self-explanatory. At least as far as EXIF tags go. Things like
"DateAcquired" and "DateArchived" don't seem to be EXIF
tags. So the first question would be what those properties
even apply to. They could even be unused values reserved
for possible future use. They could be for scanner images,
sure. It looks to me more like some kind of recordkeeping
data.

It's a gut feeling, but one of those Date columns may be the very first
time a file is created, regardless of the type of file. ATM, I think it
might just be the Date column.

Look he

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...=vs.85%29.aspx

Interesting. It's .Net docs and doesn't explain at all that
it actually comes from Shell. That says DateAcquired is
a value set by a music download service, to record when
you bought a song.
So I guess you could also figure these things out by
searching that way. But as you can see from that page and
the related links, MS is not oging to make it easy. Docs
like those are the kind of thing you have to already
understand in order to understand them.

Never thought about Date Acquired being something you purchased online.
More confusion.

My guess is that most of this is semi-experimental. MS
have never really bothered to make the data clearly
accessible in a useful way. It looks to me like a sort
of half-finished project that may eventually be finished
or may get dropped. As long as it's not officially
documented they offer no help and no apologies to
anyone who wants to fiddle around with it.

DateAcquired is a good example. Music services are supposed
to set the date when you download? That's rather silly.
And who's going to try to read it? Who buys music downloads
anymore, for that matter?

I've never bought any music or video download except for one time.
Bought a John Wayne movie AppStore using iTunes just to see how the
purchasing system of a movie works.

There's a surprising amount of that kind of thing in
Windows. Registry settings that are poorly documented
or not at all. (I've found some of them by doing things
like starting IE with RegMon running to see what Registry
values IE reads.)

The display of folders is another case. MS provide no
official docs. Their attitude is that it's none of your
business. Yet the system has been broken in pretty
much every Windows version. In WinME, icons used to
slide off into the corner of folders. On XP there's no way
to get folder windows to stick to a selected size. In figuring
out how to fix that I discovered that the whole system
was broken: Explorer records the settings for every folder,
but does it wrong and, as a result, rejects those settings
next time the folder is opened! Win7 has similar but
different problems. And MS completely switched around
the Registry system for recording folder settings in 7.
Someone spent a lot of time discombobulating the whole
system, apparently for no other reason than to break
it, so that anyone tweaking XP would be thwarted on
Win7. It's nuts.

When you get down to the nitty gritty it's amazing
how much of Windows is random, mixed up, poorly
designed or just downright batty. Like a complex machine
designed by committee. Fortunately, they're very good
about making sure that officially documented things
don't break. That's one way that Windows is far superior
to Linux or Mac. I can write highly functional software
that runs dependably on anything from Win98 to Win10,
as long as I stick to the official API. On Mac you're lucky
if 3 year old software can still be used. On Linux it's
more like a 6-12 month support cycle. But Microsoft
caters to business. Businesses write their own software.
The won't update the OS if it breaks their software.

But I can see why you'd like Macs. They do a beautiful
job. (Except for those obnoxious kiddie icons.) I think of it
like a sports car. With Mac you put on your white dress
shorts, get into your sports car, and drive along the coast,
feeling the wind in your hair. Fun. Feels hip. Windows is
more like a pickup truck. Customizable, flexible, a workhorse.
Great for picking up lumber or grass seed, which won't fit
in your sports car. But it's only fun if you think tinkering is
fun. Your sports car won't even hold a bag of groceries,
but who cares? You'll stop at a cliffside, hipster cafe if
you get hungry. Mac people don't cook. And the bottom
line is that no one ever got laid flashing a Dell laptop
around at Starbucks.

When the Apple UI started to lose the "classy" look was when I started
to enjoy the platform less.

And, I'm not a "cloud" person, I don't need Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, etc. So I'm even less thrilled with the direction both MS and
Apple are connecting everything, making people feel they can't live with
out that connectivity.



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

"Ken Springer" wrote

| I need to go back and find the post from you or Paul about what data
| travels "off disk". Notably, the Date Modified column. There is no
| info with that name in the EXIF list provided by Irfanview. But, that
| info appears to travel "off-disk" from Windows to my Mac. :-)
|

This gets back to understanding that Windows is conflating
data. What you see in right-click properties is the data that
Windows provides. It's not part of the file. Then there's
EXIF data, which is part of the file, but only in some JPGs.
And that data varies. JPGs can also have IPTC tags. Other
things may be native only to MS Office docs. (Author,
Title, Subject could be those. I'm not sure.)

So the whole thing is easier to follow if you grasp those
distinctions.

On 2/25/18 10:58 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I need to go back and find the post from you or Paul about what data
| travels "off disk". Notably, the Date Modified column. There is no
| info with that name in the EXIF list provided by Irfanview. But, that
| info appears to travel "off-disk" from Windows to my Mac. :-)
|

This gets back to understanding that Windows is conflating
data. What you see in right-click properties is the data that
Windows provides. It's not part of the file. Then there's
EXIF data, which is part of the file, but only in some JPGs.
And that data varies. JPGs can also have IPTC tags.

Got the "conflation situation" under control. ATM, I'm beginning to
think a lot of this info that you can display may be basically useless
if you a) don't know what it means, and b) can't depend on seeing the info.

Other
things may be native only to MS Office docs. (Author,
Title, Subject could be those. I'm not sure.)

Here's where my seeing the info comment plays in.

I like Softmaker Office, I have 2016. Using W7. I have the doc
properties for Textmaker filled out, there is an Author field. I took a
doc I'm currently working on, and saved as a .docx file. Opened the doc
in Word 2007. Checked properties. Yep, everything is filled out.
Resaved as a new file using .docx.

Opened the containing folder in Explorer, added Authors, and guess what?
No Authors listed for any of those 3 files.

But, as soon as I closed the programs, the Author field was filled in.
So, it would seem the Author field doesn't fill in until the program is
closed. But, even though Textmaker has the author field available, when
save in the native format, there is no author listed in the column for
that file.

Maybe you're right, they are just experimenting, and we are the guinea
pigs. LOL

So the whole thing is easier to follow if you grasp those
distinctions.
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

"Ken Springer" wrote

| Got the "conflation situation" under control. ATM, I'm beginning to
| think a lot of this info that you can display may be basically useless
| if you a) don't know what it means, and b) can't depend on seeing the
info.
|
The usefulness does seem to be limited. With JPG
as an example, if you're a photographer you might want
to know camera model and various camera settings.
But you probably don't want to try to see those in
Explorer. There are too many items. You probably
want to use a special viewer, or maybe something like
IrfanView.

So what's worth the trouble? For me it would be
width, height, date taken and maybe quality. But
quality doesn't mean much if it's 90 but that's a 90
quality on the 3rd save, making the image a junky
60 or so. I don't know of any way to find the actual
degradation extent of the image.
Width and height show when I hover the mouse.
Comments might be handy, but the problem with
comments is that you have to write them first. I
added that functionality to an Explorer Bar I made,
so that I could add Title,Desc,Topic and Date to any
JPG, but I never do it. I like to organize them by
folders. If a folder holds "Mt Desert Island 2016" I don't
need descriptions in the photos. I was there. I know
where we were and who the people are.
I think they're more useful for journalists who want
their photos self-documented.

| But, as soon as I closed the programs, the Author field was filled in.
| So, it would seem the Author field doesn't fill in until the program is
| closed. But, even though Textmaker has the author field available, when
| save in the native format, there is no author listed in the column for
| that file.

That makes sense. Windows will have some kind
of table to check these things. It will check Author
for DOCs, maybe camera model for JPG, etc. But
if Textmaker has its own format that means nothing
to Windows. It has no way to know what the format
is, and no way to know it stores metadata.

This gets back to what I've been saying: There's
no single system. There are only various systems
cooked up by people with various levels of official
authority. An EXIF "Author" tag is not the same as
an IPTC "Author" tag. And both are only in JPG. And
neither has to be there. Microsoft even created a few
EXIF tags of their own. And they broke with the protocol,
saving the values as unicode rather than ANSI strings.
Do they have authority to do that? No. But who's
going to stop them? No one is really in charge. So
Softmaker can have any kind of metadata they like,
but whether anyone else knows or respects those
values is another issue. Microsoft, especially, have
no motivation to respect extra functionality in
competing office software.

Another example is HTML. HTML has a META tag,
for metadata, which used to have a handful of
defined values. Usually a META tag has a property
or name attribute and a content attribute:
META NAME="keywords" content="dentist,fillings,crown,toothache"

That has an obvious use. Search engines look for
it, to figure out what a website is about. But then
all kinds of companies started cooking up their own META
tags. Facebook and Twitter have created their own.
Private, corporate META tags. Not officially part
of HTML, but commercial sites want to cooperate
with Facebook, so the FB META tags become
standard.

On 2/25/18 6:54 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| Got the "conflation situation" under control. ATM, I'm beginning to
| think a lot of this info that you can display may be basically useless
| if you a) don't know what it means, and b) can't depend on seeing the
info.
|
The usefulness does seem to be limited. With JPG
as an example, if you're a photographer you might want
to know camera model and various camera settings.
But you probably don't want to try to see those in
Explorer. There are too many items. You probably
want to use a special viewer, or maybe something like
IrfanView.
That type of EXIF data will interest my brother-in-law, for sure.

snip


| But, as soon as I closed the programs, the Author field was filled in.
| So, it would seem the Author field doesn't fill in until the program is
| closed. But, even though Textmaker has the author field available, when
| save in the native format, there is no author listed in the column for
| that file.

That makes sense. Windows will have some kind
of table to check these things. It will check Author
for DOCs, maybe camera model for JPG, etc. But
if Textmaker has its own format that means nothing
to Windows. It has no way to know what the format
is, and no way to know it stores metadata.

Textmaker just released the 2018 version, and I've joined their forum.
I'll ask later as I look at this stuff deeper.

Myself, I'm interested in anything that would be useful to the average
user. I doubt the f stop, focal length, etc. would be of interest, but
the date a photo was taken would be.

If you've written a document, maybe the date the doc was written to the
drive for the first time, that might be of interest.

But without knowing what the other things record, how does anyone know
if the info is of value to you or not?

snip


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"