Viewing added metadata on Windows File Explorer

[lifenewbie]

Hello, 

I am trying to edit the metadata of multiple .mp4 files in order add a sort of descriptor for each one which can be used to sort the files in Details view in Windows File Explorer.

i.e. I have 1000 .mp4s which I have listed in .csv format thanks to exiftool:

exiftool -csv FOLDER > metadata.csv).

I then went and tagged them manually with numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. In excel, I can thus sort these files by their new number tag. I want to add that number tag to each of the files.

So I tested on one file using this:

exiftool -artist=0 file.mp4

I can view this metadata information using this: (and it correctly named the Artist as 0):

exiftool file.mp4

However, I want to also see this "Artist" information in File Explorer details. It just doesn't show. Is there a particular tag which would work with Windows File Explorer?

Thanks

[Hayo Baan]

Maybe @Stargeek knows this from the top of his head, but you could find this out yourself too. Simply change the field you want changed in windows itself and then look with exiftool to find the tag it was actually written to. This one you should then use instead of (or on top of) the artist tag you are now using.

Hope this helps,
Hayo

[lifenewbie]

Good idea. Thank you.

[lifenewbie]

Aight. So i followed that suggestion, and i edited the details in Properties of a few different files. The details I edited were Comment, Artist, and Genre. Just to see if it would work. Once edited in the file properties in File Explorer, it indeed shows up in File Explorer details (obviously).

Then I went back to exiftool, and viewed the metadata for that file and found that the 'tag' is written exactly as "Comment", "Artist" and "Genre". So I edit those tags in exiftool (for a different, clean, file) and they still doesn't show up in File Explorer.

On another note, I tried editing multiple files in one go by using the exiftool -csv=CSVFILE FOLDER thing, and in addition to still not showing up in File Explorer, there were about 300 errors out of a thousand

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Error: '\xed8\xfb^' atom is too large for rewriting (4087 MB) (all files are pretty much the same size and less than 41Kb each).

Help much appreciated. thanks.

[Phil Harvey]

See FAQ 3.

You need to specify the location when writing with ExifTool so it will be written where Explorer is expecting it.

If you email me a sample I can take a look at the error (philharvey66 at gmail.com)

- Phil

[lifenewbie]

Thank you very much. Indeed, that FAQ q.3 would appear to be the answer.

After inputting -a -G1 -s it showed me this:

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[Microsoft]     Director                        : TEST
[Microsoft]     Period                          : TEST
[Microsoft]     Publisher                       : TEST

So I did the following:

exiftool -a -Microsoft:Director=test -Microsoft:Period=test -Microsoft:Publisher=test file.mp4

and this error appeared for each one (i tried various other things too, but I think this was supposed to be correct):

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Warning: Sorry, Microsoft:Director doesn't exist or isn't writable
Warning: Sorry, Microsoft:Period doesn't exist or isn't writable
Warning: Sorry, Microsoft:Publisher doesn't exist or isn't writable

Is this the end of the road?

---

Which regards the error mentioned above, I am really grateful that you offered me to email a sample of the affected files, but unfortunately I can't send these files (and I can't find the same error on other files). Would the following information help to resolve the matter: with the -a -G1 -s options, one line is the following output:

[ExifTool]      Warning                         : Truncated 'xed8xfb]' data

[Phil Harvey]

After inputting -a -G1 -s it showed me this:

Code Select Expand

[Microsoft]     Director                        : TEST
[Microsoft]     Period                          : TEST
[Microsoft]     Publisher                       : TEST

Ouch.  The Microsoft tags aren't even on my radar yet for adding the write ability.   Wow.  (I was afraid of this.)  It would be wonderful if there were a single standard that everyone used.

ExifTool can currently create XMP, ItemList and UserData tags in MOV/MP4 videos, and edit Keys tags if they exist.  I guess I'll have to add Microsoft tags to the wish list, but it would be a while before ExifTool could write these.

Is this the end of the road?

Yes, unless Windows will recognize some other type of metadata that ExifTool can write. 

Which regards the error mentioned above [...]

It may be helpful if you could post the output "out.txt" file from this command as an attachment in the forum:

exiftool -v3 FILE > out.txt

Thanks.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

Ouch.  The Microsoft tags aren't even on my radar yet for adding the write ability.   Wow.  (I was afraid of this.)

I don't believe that even ffmpeg can write to the Microsoft tags, though I could be wrong.

The only tool that I found that wrote to some of the Microsoft tags was MP3Tag, which, despite the name, will write some tags in mp4 files.

[lifenewbie]

Thanks for the replies and excuse the delay (t'was a beautiful weekend here in Lisbon, good break from the screen).

I will play around with MP3Tag/ffmpeg and see how I get along. Another fix, I suppose would be to convert the files to a supported format. Anyway, I'm quite enjoying playing around with exiftool - while I'm still new to it, it has already saved me days of work. If only I could get my colleagues off their old MS File Explorer habits...

I attach the requested out.txt

Thanks again

[Phil Harvey]

Thanks for the dump.  It looks like there could be a bit of garbage at the end of the file (35 bytes to be exact).  Probably nothing to worry about, but it will prevent ExifTool from writing the file.

- Phil