[packetlost]

Yeah, IMO extended metadata attributes are fine for caching data that can be recovered via other means but generally violate the principal of least surprise. For them to be successful a standardized transparent container format or something would be necessary, but at that point the FS abstraction is leaking.

[prmph]

What about using the file name itself as the metadata storage?

[jmathai]

I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for “album”.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922

Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don’t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands.

https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTo...

[packetlost]

That works but has strict length limits and is visibly ugly. Fine for very limited cases I guess