Examining Metadata

Once you've run a search and you've found what you're looking for, you can examine the metadata that is associated with that item. (What's metadata?) This is very powerful because Meta gives you access to the rich set of metadata that Mac OS X stores about every item on your computer - not just the basics, like the size of the item or its modification date, but also advanced and interesting metadata like the aperture and exposure time of a digital photo, or the genre and year in which your mp3 was recorded.

For example, if you want to look up the email address of your Great Aunt Becky to thank her for the wonderful winter hat she knitted for you, you don't have to leave Meta. Just run a search that finds her Address Book card, like this:

kind:person name:"Becky Meyers"

Then, once the search has found her Address Book card, just select it in the Search Results pane...

Meta Search Window, showing Becky Meyers's Address Book card selected in the Search Results pane.

click the disclosure button next to the Advanced header in the Item Details pane to reveal more information about the item...

Meta Search Window, showing the mouse clicking on the triangular disclosure button to the left of the Advanced header in the Item Details pane.

and find her email address under the "email addresses" metadata tag name:

Meta Search Window, showing Great Aunt Becky's email address highlighted in the Item Details pane.

By examining the metadata that Mac OS X associates with your items, as we have here, you can learn a lot about them that you may not have even imagined possible.

Learning More: The Item Details Pane

The Item Details pane contains a wide assortment of metadata about your selected item. The data is divided up into the following sections, which can be accessed by clicking the disclosure button to the left of the header:

Basic: Basic metadata about the item, like its name, size, and modification date
Advanced: More advanced metadata about the item, such as its content type tree
File: Metadata specific to the file system, like its creator code and owner ID
Image: Advanced image metadata, like the height and width in pixels, or even the aperture and exposure time, if it's a digital photo
Audio: Advanced audio metadata, such as the sample rate and audio channel count
Video: Advanced video metadata, like the codec that was use dot encode it and the video bit rate
Custom: Custom metadata associated with the item by third-party software

These sections contain some really interesting and useful information about your files, so use them to dig in and find out more about what's on your computer.