hoakley July 9, 2021 Macs, Technology

Finder’s metadata puzzles

Finder remains, for all its warts and quirks, an amazingly powerful front end to what’s stored on your Mac. When it comes to metadata, it can be highly informative and at the same time deeply puzzling. This article looks at three different ways Finder presents file metadata, and their peculiarities.

Get Info

Select any file (or folder) and press Command-I to see the Get Info dialog.

Depending on the type of file selected, you should also see in the More info section anything from a blank to this detail for a music track.

Thumbnail Information

If you use the Finder’s Column View and select a file, below its QuickLook thumbnail is another list of information about that item. What is shown again depends on the file type, and for the same music track matches that shown in the Get Info dialog.

List view columns

Depending on where that file is, if you switch the Finder window to List View and Control-click on any of the column headers, you’ll be shown a list of metadata which can be viewed in columns. At first sight, this appears to include the same categories as shown in the Get Info dialog and thumbnail information, but look closely and it isn’t. This list lacks Audio channels and Sample rate, but adds Rating and Track number.

Preview Options

To see the options for displaying metadata of any given file type, find a file of that type and Control-click on it for the contextual menu. Select the Show Preview Options command, and you’ll see a list of the metadata categories which you can select from. But there’s something very strange going on here: the moment that you open Preview Options, the Information displayed under the thumbnail changes to match what’s selected in the list, which is different again from what’s shown in Get Info, thumbnail information, or the options for columns in List view. And the moment you close Preview Options, the information displayed flips back to what it was showing before, which isn’t what’s selected here.

Selected folders only

The final oddity is that extended options for columns in List view only apply to certain folders. In your ~/Documents folder, there are only the standard metadata to choose from. In ~/Movies, ~/Music and ~/Pictures the Finder offers extended options according to the types of file it expects to find there. Not only that, but you can sometimes cheat the Finder into offering those extensions in another folder if you rename it to one of those standard names, and that can persist after you have changed to name to something else.

What to do?

As far as I can see, these behaviours are set by the Finder’s code, its preference file com.apple.finder.plist (which contains many lists of metadata which could be involved), and hidden files such as .desktop.ini and the dreaded .DS_Store (which is so secret that it isn’t shown even when hidden files are listed). I’ve looked for a third-party utility which might be able to take control and iron out some of the strangeness, but can’t find any.

Maybe metadata are just supposed to be a mystifying maze.

14Comments

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1

winmaciek on July 9, 2021 at 10:44 am
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Excellent article, as always. I wasn’t fully aware of the customisation options available when using non-list view options.
Personally, I prefer using the Inspector (⌘+⌥+I) rather than Get Info as the former updates its contents whenever file selection changes.

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- 2
  
  hoakley on July 9, 2021 at 6:09 pm
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  Thank you. Yes, that floating window version of Get Info is ideal when you want to inspect a series of items.
  Howard.
  
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3

Milo on July 9, 2021 at 4:18 pm
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Not related to metadata, but here is another Finder puzzle. Make finder save the viewing preferences for a mounted dmg or sparsebundle. Specifically try to change the settings to list view and make that setting permanent so that it still applies on the the next mount of the volume.

It’s possible. You have to select and deselect settings in a specific order. Unfortunately I can never remeber the correct order ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

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- 4
  
  hoakley on July 9, 2021 at 6:11 pm
  Reply
  
  Thank you. For that I recommend C-Control’s DropDMG, which is the most complete tool available.
  Howard.
  
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  - 5
    
    Milo on July 9, 2021 at 9:33 pm
    Reply
    
    Thank you for the suggestion. I am sure DropDMG is a very good app. But it’s a little bit overkill to just change the view setting of a dmg every now and then.
    
    I found the article that describes how to convince Finder to change the default view. It was suprisingly hard to find it again. Maybe someone finds this useful.
    
    http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100924054732907
    
    According to the aricle the bug was first introduced in Snow Leopard. Seems to be one of those famous regression bugs.
    
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    - 6
      
      hoakley on July 9, 2021 at 10:26 pm
      
      Thanks for that link.
      If you make DMGs with any frequency, DropDMG does a great deal more than just fix view settings – it’s the only specialist app, and make Disk Utility look greatly underpowered. It’s also excellently supported.
      I have no commercial association with C-Command, although DropDMG’s developer is Michael Tsai, who’s very well known in the community.
      Howard.
      
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7

Duncan on July 9, 2021 at 5:58 pm
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For me, the most infuriating aspect of the Get Info panel is its reporting on file size, or inconsistent failure thereof. I rely heavily on that piece of information when copying/moving files around and for comparing what might be duplicates, etc. When doing so for a sufficiently-large folder full of data, the Get Info panel will first present no information while it’s busy calculating the size (so far so good), but will then on many occasions present a number that may or may not get revised later when you’re not watching.

The reporting of data size should be binary, in all senses of the word. Either show the correct value or don’t show anything at all. Anything in between is worse than useless, as it presents false information that might cause incorrect actions on behalf of the user as a result.

I thought APFS was supposed to solve this problem but apparently not.

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- 8
  
  hoakley on July 9, 2021 at 6:45 pm
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  Thank you.
  One of APFS’s many original features was the near-instant calculation of folder sizes. Unfortunately, in the implementation this became a special feature which apparently has to be set when a folder is first created, and it’s not something which has been exposed to the user. I still don’t understand why this isn’t both simpler and more reliable, though.
  Howard.
  
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- 9
  
  John Gilbert on July 10, 2021 at 4:13 am
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  I don’t think there is such a thing as “the correct value” for file and folder sizes, particularly with APFS.
  
  For a folder is the correct value: a) the sum of used bytes in each file, b) the sum of space occupied on disk by the blocks of each file, c) the sum of space occupied on disk but reduced to account for some files sharing disk blocks.
  
  For your purposes (comparing files for duplicates) you are interested in the space used by the file content and not the space occupied on disk. But when deleting files to increase free space you would want the space used on the disk.
  
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  - 10
    
    hoakley on July 10, 2021 at 6:30 am
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    Thank you.
    The Finder already sets its standard for this: it produces a byte count for each file, and the space occupied on disk. It ignores any savings obtained by using clones or sparse files, and excludes extended attributes, which are stored in the file system metadata rather than the file itself.
    Yet it seems unable to calculate the sums of those for folders without delay and correction. Why?
    Howard.
    
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    - 11
      
      Duncan on July 11, 2021 at 3:42 pm
      
      The Finder’s standard for file size is as it should be, as that’s what the info panel is for. The user selected a file or folder *in the Finder*, and should expect ‘Finder-appropriate’ values for their inquiry. Yes, there are other meanings to what a file/folder size might be, as John Gilbert points out, but those values are more useful for a task when managing disk space or other file-system operations.
      
      (A different solution, albeit non-Apple-like, would be an expanded Info panel that shows all types of size data. I used to have the ‘Super Get Info’ utility which might show that, but it’s been years, and beyond what the typical Info inquiry requires.)
      
      As for APFS having the sizes pre-calculated, these days that should be a given. Spotlight computes far more data analysis on files already; how hard should it be to include the byte count and store that as well?
      
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    - 12
      
      hoakley on July 11, 2021 at 7:21 pm
      
      Thank you.
      Can I offer you the alternative of my free Precize, which even tells you the space occupied by extended attributes, and whether a sparse file, etc.?
      Howard.
      
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13

John Gilbert on July 10, 2021 at 4:34 am
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Path Finder’s list view presents more choice for columns and sorting. And PF is more consistent than Finder in that it doesn’t have different rules for special folders.

Better than Finder? Yes for metadata, but not perfect. And I find PF rather cumbersome to use compared with Finder.

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- 14
  
  hoakley on July 10, 2021 at 6:33 am
  Reply
  
  Thank you.
  Yes, Path Finder is an option. As you write, it comes at a cost of being significantly more cumbersome. It also isn’t free and so deeply integrated into macOS (see also Open and Save dialogs, for example).
  Howard.
  
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