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On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spo
by sirn 9y ago
On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time).
AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.
- oneplane 9y agoNo, that's only part of the story. Early on, they were using resource forks for data but metadata as well. Then they moved to filesystem attributes and those just grew. You can have tags in there, as well as text, icons, settings etc. It's pretty standardized, but on top of that, you can use Spotlight metadata too, both in the EA as well ans the V100 DB.