File Metadata (FileMeta)

What the software delivered here does is to connect up Explorer with the originally intended support for storing metadata as properties in NTFS in alternate streams in files. If programs had tag lines, then this one’s would be ‘Meta late than never’. But there is no fix for the original problem that caused this feature not to be shipped; for example you will still lose the metadata when you e-mail the file. Personally, I think that's fine: a feature that is very useful even if I have to be aware of its limitations is okay by me. However, I have also included a mitigation. You can export the metadata to a separate XML file, and import it again to reapply it to the original file elsewhere (or indeed to a different file). So, for example, you can e-mail the metadata with a file as a separate attachment. The final element of the package is a file association manager. This is useful because Explorer displays metadata based on the file’s extension. It would be possible to turn on alternate stream metadata for all file types, but this would interfere with the presentation of metadata for the file types where metadata is already supported. Therefore, I have created an association manager to allow you to turn on alternate stream metadata only for specific file types, as many as desired. Because the software implements standard interfaces and stores standard properties in a standard way, existing code can be used for programmatic access to the metadata (see DSOFile), and the metadata is also picked up by Windows search.