Metadata

At a high level, metadata is simply "data about data." Relative to Name Mangler, metadata is the data that's recorded with certain files—audio, video, and images in particular—that provides additional information about that file.

For example, here's the metadata for a photo taken with a Nikon DSLR. (This is simply the file's File ➝ Get Info dialog in Finder, with the More Info section revealed.)

All of the entries in the More Info section are metadata; as you can see, there's a lot of extra information there. But that's just the metadata for an image file; macOS can track lots of metadata values for various types of files. The good news is that you can use any of this metadata in your Name Mangler renaming actions.

See the metadata items section for a comprehensive list of every metadata item you can use in Name Mangler.

 

macOS vs Other Metadata

It's very important to note that Name Mangler does not read raw metadata directly from photos, videos, and audio files.

That is, EXIF and BWF metadata and the like are not what Name Mangler uses for its metadata source. Instead, Name Mangler uses macOS's metadata, which is imported into macOS from those source files. Not everything is imported, though, because source metadata often has fields that macOS doesn't know about.

You can use Terminal to check what metadata macOS has stored for a particular file. Launch Terminal (found in Applications > Utilities), type mdls, press the Space Bar, drag and drop the file of interest from Finder into Terminal, then press Return. The output will look something like this:

Each of the kMDItem... entries is a piece of metadata, and you can use it in your renaming actions. You can find references to each and every kMDItem... entry further down in this section, in case you wonder what a certain value may represent.

 

Accessing Metadata

Metadata can be used in numerous places in Name Mangler—just look for the plus sign at the end of an input field, as seen here in the Insert command's text box:

Anywhere you see this plus sign, you can click it to reveal Name Mangler's metadata browser. From this metadata browser, you can easily work with all available metadata fields.

Keyboard fanatics, you can activate the browser by pressing ⌘+, as long as you've first used the Tab key to select a field in which metadata is allowed.

In addition, you can use metadata in Advanced Mode by simply typing an open angle bracket and typing; see the Advanced Mode help for more information on how this works.

 

The Metadata Browser

When you click the plus sign in an eligible input field, the metadata browser will appear:

There are lots—as in hundreds—of metadata items. And while you can drill down into the categories using the mouse (or keyboard), the quickest way to use the browser is to do as it says, and start typing. As you type, the browser will automatically shorten the list based on matches for what you've typed.

As you can see, you don't have to type letters from the beginning of words; the browser pattern matches against every letter in every each word in the metadata terms list. (You must type at least two letters to start searching, due to the sheer number of matches found on just one character.)

Here, with just four characters, the browser has singled out Phone Numbers as the desired field. Once you see your desired metadata term, click on it with the mouse, or highlight it with the arrow keys, then press Enter. When you do that, you'll see the metadata field in the input box, in a colored box:

Here's an example showing how to add images' resolutions to their filenames. Using the Add Suffix command, choose the Width and Height metadata items, and format them as you'd like:

With the command set up as desired, the file info area will show a preview of the image files' new names:

As you can see, the height and width have been appended, in a nicely formatted and easy to read manner. That's really all there is to using metadata: find the fields you want to use, format them with surrounding text as you desire, and then add them to your filenames. There are, however, some tips and tricks to getting the most out of metadata; keep reading to learn about those.

 

Tips and Tricks

Mingle metadata and text

A simple tip, but useful for formatting filenames: you can intermix text and metadata fields in a renaming operation, like this:

Obviously, you'll want to be careful about creating monstrously-long filenames, but a few well-placed characters can greatly enhance readability.

Always-available metadata fields

As noted earlier, in order to use metadata, the files you're renaming must have metadata. There are, however, a few exceptions to that rule. When you activate the metadata browser, notice that the first Names entry is outside the METADATA section. Select it to see a number of filename-related values that can be used with every file:

There are also three entries at the bottom of the list that can be used with any file: Total Number of Items, Current Date, and Random Characters. These do exactly what you would expect—though two of them have additional configuration options (see below).

In addition, there are some scattered always-available metadata entries in other sections. For instance, every file will have creation and modification timestamps, a file size, and a path; you'll find all of these items in the File section.

(All of the metadata fields are described in the metadata items section of this help page.)

Metadata with additional options

After adding metadata to an input box, you'll typically just see a simple 'pill,' as with the Phone Numbers field below left. But others—Height, Width, and Current Date, to name a few—look a bit different, by way of a small downward-facing arrow:

Click that downward-facing arrow to reveal a drop-down menu containing formatting options for the selected metadata field. If you've chosen a date/time or numeric metadata field, you'll see one of these two self-explanatory menus:

If you select the Random Characters metadata field, you get a different menu:

Use the Eligible Characters section of the menu to limit the types of characters in your random string, and the Number of Characters section to control the length of the resulting string.

 

Metadata Glossary

The following glossary is arranged in the category-field order shown in the metadata browser.