Add search metadata

Drag and drop one or more documents (not folders) onto the SearchKeyLite icon in the Finder or Dock, or use the Open command in the File menu to open any document and add/edit its metadata.

When you open an item, any metadata already contained in those five extended attributes will be displayed in their respective text boxes. You can then edit those metadata until you are happy with them. These extended attributes are best with short text content, although they will work with more than 100 KB of text in each.

⚠️ If you leave a text box empty, that extended attribute will not be written to the file when you save changes.

To break lines in the text boxes, press Option-Enter . You can cut, copy, and paste text in the text boxes as you would expect, but styling is not supported: the attributes only store plain not styled text. For speed, the Copy All and Paste All menu commands, with respective shortcuts ⌘⇧ C and ⌘⇧ V, will copy and paste the complete contents of all five boxes in a single action.

Because an empty text box is not written out to that extended attribute, use this as a way to change only certain attributes. For example, to write out just a Copyright extended attribute to a file, edit one window to contain all blank boxes except the Copyright box. In that box, enter your copyright statement. Then Copy All from that window, and Paste All into the window for the destination file. You will see that only the Copyright box has changed.

⚠️ When you Save , the text which you have entered is converted into XML format before writing it out to each extended attribute. Unlike in xattred (which works in raw XML), you should not enter the XML ‘escape’ forms for characters, such as &amp; for & (ampersand). SearchKeyLite works with plain Unicode UTF-8 characters, and should handle any conversions automatically.

Once you are happy with the metadata, use the Save menu command, ⌘S, or click on the Save button to write them out to the extended attributes for that file. To leave the metadata unchanged, close the window or click on its Cancel button. ⚠️ You will not be warned, though, that any changes have not been saved.

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