Spotlight Comments Rule!

Continuing my quest to rid my house of unnecessary paper by finding a decent document management solution…

When I last left it, I was saving my scanned documents as pdfs, and then using the annotate tool in the Preview program of Mac OS X Tiger to add comments, keywords, etc. to documents as needed.

A Contentious reader pointed out that it’s probably not a good idea to mix metadata with the content of a document. Yes, that’s a good point – since those annotations do become permanent parts of the document.

This morning I stumbled across yet another feature of my laptop’s operating system that probably will be much better (for my purposes) than pdf annotations: Spotlight comments…

Did you know that you can use the Spotlight desktop search tool built into Mac OS X Tiger to append comments to any document? After you’ve saved the document, click on it in the Finder and hit command-i to bring up the file info window.

Right at the top of the file info window is a bar that says “Spotlight comments.” If you click on the down arrow in that bar, it opens up a text field where you can type comments, keywords, etc. This data becomes associated with that file, and when you use Spotlight desktop search it includes these comments in its search and will turn documents with relevant comments up in results.

Yeeeeeee-hah!

Unlike pdf annotations, Spotlight comments can be modified or deleted at any time. So I’m not irrevocably mixing metadata and contents. Also, I can add Spotlight comments to any type of file, not just pdfs – which is good, since jpeg and tiff images of scanned documents are generally smaller files. Scanning every document in pdf format would have ended up consuming much more space on my hard drive in the long run.

(And yes, I do have a good backup system in place for all my files, don’t worry!)

Now if only Spotlight had a tagging function so I could just pick keywords I specify off a list (rather than having to type them every time), I would be ecstatic….

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on October 20, 2005 at 9:27 am and filed under Resources. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

I used Spotlight this weekend to append extensive notes to the 75 audio clips I ended up with after covering an event for my podcast. Until embedding information in the audio files themselves becomes an easily accessible option, this kind of solution is probably the best we have.

I’m not sure whether or not there is a limit on the amount of text you can put into the Spotlight comment box, but it could also function as a primitive transcription tool as well, with the convenience of having the text actually attached to the file.

Georgia

[Reply]

1. Caribbean Free Radio on October 24th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Now, if only Spotlight came in a PC version . . .

[Reply]

2. Wayne Wildman on October 21st, 2005 at 1:32 pm