Following my lament on how metadata are woefully underused, I’m delighted to do a bit more to open their access, with a new version of my lightweight metadata editor Metamer.

Metamer gives you quick and convenient access to 16 of the most commonly used extended attributes for attaching metadata to files. Most popular are Keywords, but the app also supports Authors, Comment, Copyright, Creator, Description, FinderComment, Headline, Information, Kind, Languages, Projects, Subject, Title, Version, and ApplicationCategories. Additionally you can edit any other extended attribute containing text as a CFString or CFArray of CFStrings, although for those you’ll need to provide the full name of that extended attribute.

You have a choice of ways in which this new version can open a document. Its document window now contains space onto which you can drag and drop files, you can use its standard Open File dialog, or drag and drop onto the app icon in the Dock.

Some of you who have used earlier versions of Metamer asked for somewhere to keep lists of keywords to make it easier to add them to a succession of documents. This comes in a new Scratchpad window, where you can assemble any text that you might want, then copy and paste it into the Keywords or whichever metadata you’re editing. For your convenience, the contents of the Scratchpad are automatically saved to Metamer’s preferences, so they’ll still be there the next time you open the app.

Although the Scratchpad works in plain text (as do these extended attributes), you can change the size of the font that it uses.

Note that Metamer works with extended attributes attached to files, and not metadata embedded into specific file formats, such as EXIF data in images. Those stored in extended attributes can be added to any file, and are readily used in Spotlight search.

Metamer version 1.3 requires macOS 10.14.6 or later, and is now available from here: metamer13
from Downloads above, from its Product Page, and through its auto-update mechanism. It should now prove the perfect partner for Spotcord, to build vocabularies of Keywords and other metadata.