It has been a few weeks since we released our latest 0.6 beta of FileMind, the (soon to be) ultimate File Metadata manager. What keeps us so busy these days? If things like eggnog, cookies or other lures of the Holiday season sprint to your mind, you are misguided. It’s actually PDF and metadata editing!

The upcoming release will progress from 0.6 to 0.8, with most of the enhancements inside the code and framework. We are also adding a new dialog window that will change the way you can add new metadata fields to a file. This dialog is also going to be the base for more sophisticated features, such as creating metadata templates and applying them to one or more files in a single step.

The current PDF plug-in also gets a major overhaul, with added support for complex PDF files, encryption and more stability in regards to XMP extraction and writing.

So for now, it’s Happy New Year for everybody – and stay tuned for the new beta!

Hyper Smash

In case you ever wondered why you should worry about your files, here is a good reason: watch this short video done by the Library of Congress (3 minutes). It will remind you how fragile it is to be “all digital”.

If you started working on computers before the turn of the millennium, there is a good chance you have had the pain and panic joy to migrate valuable files from “floppies”, “ZIP drives” and other deceased mediums to safer grounds. Read more…

Steve Jobs and Michael Dell did it. Executives are sometimes tempted  to swap those worthless options (issued before the crash…) with some shiny (…newly backdated…) and lucrative ones. However, we live in the days of electronic documents: getting caught (with the hand in the cookie jar…) is a risk, because embedded file metadata can show the accurate date of a Word or PDF document! And recently, more courts consider this vital piece of information as a part of the discovery process.

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Like tinkering with metadata? Sign up for the limited private Metability FileMind beta test now!
FileMind is not yet feature complete; chances are pretty good that your very own requirements may end up as built-in functionality in the final version. All active beta testers receive a FREE license of the release version! Read more…

Adding metadata costs time, there is no doubt. However, content editing applications such as MS Office or Photoshop are not optimized for this. Its best to use a separate tool that allows you to tag your files faster and with a higher accuracy. If you are new to metadata, you may ask yourself: Why bother anyway?

Tagging images, audio and video clips may seem most obvious, since the contain little or no textual information that could be gobbled up by a search tool. Even the snazziest PCs have a hard time to do anything else besides reading text. But is it all about Rich Media files?

Read more…