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by jabroni_salad 796 days ago
My experience with metadata is that a lot of applications don't care about its integrity but will never mess with the filename unless that is the purpose of the application.

Demo a sync program and find that all the creation dates have changed to today!
1 comments
kps 796 days ago
> My experience with metadata is that a lot of applications don't care about its integrity [...]

This has led me to formally maintaining significant metadata in the filename, for certain kinds of files; everything else gets lost or diverges. For instance, a book file might be named `Title [a=Jim Smith; isbn=9781234567890].pdf`.

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quesera 796 days ago
I feel like you're probably kidding, but I kind of like this.

Maybe not psyched about the shell-interpreted brackets, semicolons, and spaces. But the idea is interesting!

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kps 796 days ago
No, I'm serious. There's no portable filesystem metadata, and while a few kinds of media files have facilities for internal metadata (e.g. EXIF and ID3), most don't. A file name is the only non-content that is easy to keep associated with any kind of file.

The syntax is definitely an imperfect compromise, but most of the things I use this for have titles that frequently contain spaces (books, papers, music, etc.) so quoting would be necessary anyway, and I made myself a Python package to help with escaping and do other utility tasks like normalizing ISBNs.

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jabroni_salad 795 days ago
that's a good idea, especially if you don't want to keep a database to manage your library. In the piracy side of things we just make sure to name files something that can be used to look it up in the database and get metadata from that.

Although I have to warn you that ISBNs are not a perfect guid and they sometimes get reissued. Good enough if you aren't hoarding the world I guess.

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