Skip to main content

Read and write meta data, such as tags/keywords, on Mac OS X files

Project description

osxmetadata Homepage

Code style: black License: MIT

What is osxmetadata?

osxmetadata provides a simple interface to access various metadata about Mac OS X files. Currently supported metadata includes tags/keywords, Finder comments, and download data (downloaded where from and downloaded data). This module was inspired by osx-tags by "Ben S / scooby" and extended for my needs. It is published under the same MIT license.

Supported operating systems

Only works on Mac OS X.

Installation instructions

osxmetadata uses setuptools, thus simply run:

python setup.py install

Command Line Usage

Installs command line tool called osxmetadata. This is not full replacement for mdls and xattr commands but provides a simple interface to view/edit metadata supported by osxmetadata

Currently, only supports reading/writing tags and Finder comments and export to text or JSON. Can import metadata from a JSON file to restore tags & Finder comments. I plan to add additional metadata in the future. My use case for import/export to JSON is to backup metadata for use with cloud services such as backblaze that do not preserve metadata stored in extended attributes. By exporting all metadata to a JSON file which backblaze etc. will backup, you can restore metadata if you ever need to restore files from backup.

If you only care about the command line tool, I recommend installing with pipx

usage: osxmetadata [-h] [-v] [-j] [-q] [--force] [-o OUTFILE] [-r RESTORE]
                   [--addtag ADDTAG] [--cleartags] [--rmtag RMTAG]
                   [--setfc SETFC] [--clearfc] [--addfc ADDFC]
                   [files [files ...]]

Import and export metadata from files

positional arguments:
  files

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message
  -v, --verbose         Print verbose output during processing
  -j, --json            Output to JSON, optionally provide output file name:
                        --outfile=file.json NOTE: if processing multiple files
                        each JSON object is written to a new line as a
                        separate object (ie. not a list of objects)
  -q, --quiet           Be extra quiet when running.
  --force               Force new metadata to be written even if unchanged
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Name of output file. If not specified, output goes to
                        STDOUT
  -r RESTORE, --restore RESTORE
                        Restore all metadata by reading from JSON file RESTORE
                        (previously created with --json --outfile=RESTORE).
                        Will overwrite all existing metadata with the metadata
                        specified in the restore file. NOTE: JSON file
                        expected to have one object per line as written by
                        --json
  --addtag ADDTAG       add tag/keyword for file. To add multiple tags, use
                        multiple --addtag otions. e.g. --addtag foo --addtag
                        bar
  --cleartags           remove all tags from file
  --rmtag RMTAG         remove tag from file
  --setfc SETFC         set Finder comment
  --clearfc             clear Finder comment
  --addfc ADDFC         append a Finder comment, preserving existing comment

Example uses of the module

from osxmetadata import *

fname = 'foo.txt'

meta = OSXMetaData(fname)
print(meta.name)
print(meta.finder_comment)
print(meta.tags)
print(meta.where_from)
print(str(meta.download_date))

Tags

Accessed via OSXMetaData.tags

Behaves mostly like a set with following methods:

  • update (sets multiple tags)
  • add (add a single tag)
  • += (add a single tag)
  • remove (raises error if tag not present)
  • discard (does not raise error if tag not present)
  • clear (removes all tags)

To replace all tags with a new set of tags, use clear() then update()

Duplicate tags will be ignored.

The standard OS X Finder color labels are handled via tags. For example, setting a tag name of Gray, Green, Purple, Blue, Yellow, Red, or Orange will also set the equivalent Finder color label. This is consistent with how the Finder works. If a file has a color label, it will be returned as a tag of the corresponding color name when reading from OSXMetaData.tags

>>> from osxmetadata import OSXMetaData
>>> md = OSXMetaData('foo.txt')
>>> md.tags.update('Foo','Gray','Red','Test')
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Gray, Red, Test
#Standard Mac Finder color labels are normalized
>>> md.tags.add('PURPLE')
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Purple, Red, Test, Gray
>>> md.tags.add('FOOBAR')
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Purple, Red, Test, Gray, FOOBAR
>>> md.tags += 'MyCustomTag'
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Purple, Red, Test, Gray, MyCustomTag, FOOBAR
>>> md.tags.remove('Purple')
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Red, Test, Gray, MyCustomTag, FOOBAR
>>> md.tags.remove('Purple')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "osxmetadata/osxmetadata.py", line 148, in remove
    tags.remove(self.__tag_normalize(tag))
KeyError: 'Purple\n3'
>>> md.tags.discard('Purple')
>>> md.tags.discard('Red')
>>> print(md.tags)
Foo, Test, Gray, MyCustomTag, FOOBAR
>>> len(md.tags)
5
>>> md.tags.clear()
>>> print(md.tags)

>>> len(md.tags)
0
>>>

Finder Comments

Accessed via OXMetaData.finder_comment

Behaves mostly like a string. You can assign a string or use +=. To clear, assign None or ''

>>> md.finder_comment = 'My Comment'
>>> print(md.finder_comment)
My Comment
>>> md.finder_comment += ', and FooBar!'
>>> print(md.finder_comment)
My Comment, and FooBar!
>>> md.finder_comment = None
>>> print(md.finder_comment)

>>>

Download Data

Accessed via OSXMetaData.download_date (datetime.datetime object) and OSXMetaData.where_from (list of URLs as strings)

>>> import datetime
>>> md.download_date = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> print(str(md.download_date))
2018-12-15 15:45:10.869535
>>> md.where_from = ['http://wwww.mywebsite.com','https://downloads.mywebsite.com/downloads/foo']
>>> print(md.where_from)
['http://wwww.mywebsite.com', 'https://downloads.mywebsite.com/downloads/foo']
>>> md.where_from=[]
>>> print(md.where_from)
[]
>>>

Usage Notes

Changes are immediately written to the file. For example, OSXMetaData.tags.add('Foo') immediately writes the tag 'Foo' to the file.

Metadata is refreshed from disk every time a class property is accessed.

This will only work on file systems that support Mac OS X extended attributes.

Dependencies

PyObjC

xattr

Acknowledgements

This module was inspired by osx-tags by "Ben S / scooby". I leveraged osx-tags to bootstrap the design of this module. I wanted a more general OS X metadata library so I rolled my own.

To set the Finder comments, I use py-applescript by "Raymond Yee / rdhyee". Rather than import this module, I included the entire module (which is published as public domain code) in a private module to prevent ambiguity with other applescript modules on PyPi. py-applescript uses a native bridge via PyObjC and is very fast compared to the other osascript based modules.

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

osxmetadata-0.96.83.tar.gz (31.5 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

osxmetadata-0.96.83-py3-none-any.whl (31.4 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Python 3

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page