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lamcro
Asked: 2010-09-30 09:39:07 +0800 CST

File properties(notes) not synced between local accounts

  • 772

I started scanning personal documents recently and storing them in a folder in my account, now I'm adding text, related to each document, on the Notes tab of each document's Properties window.

When I enabled this folder to be shared by my wife from her account, she can see the scanned documents, but not the notes themselves; the tab appears empty.

  • Is there a way to enable sharing those notes? I got to re-check if I enabled sharing correctly.
  • Should I place those document in a separate folder; one not inside my own account?
  • Is there an application that is better suited for this type of job? Some document management software?
  • Some documents are in JPG while others are in PDF.
nautilus file-properties document-management

2 Answers

  1. Just a quick info, not really a solution:

    Notes aren't written to the file itself, they are stored in a file in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata.

    Since this is in your ~, it makes sense that it wouldn't be shared with other accounts.

    So it doesn't matter that the files are shared, the notes to the files are your personal notes, and won't be shared.

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  2. As the notes aren't stored in the file itself (as per ParanoiaPuppy's answer), the only way you could make the notes "public" in the sense that they can be shared is to embed your notes in the jpg itself, using Exif (actually as IPTC keywords). This will only work for jpg files (to my knowledge), so your PDFs would have to be updated some other way, perhaps annotations on the PDF itself.

    To update the Exif properties on a jpg, I can recommend using jBrout, which I write about, and Exif generally here : http://www.scaine.net/site/2010/01/jbrout/

    In fact, this might not help, since you might need to use more than IPTC keywords for the notes you're adding. jBrout supports a "Comment" field which does appear to be written to the file somehow, but sadly it's not visible by Nautilus.

    To demonstrate, here's a file with two IPTC keywords and a comment added via jBrout, then viewed in Nautilus - there's only the keywords visible... no comment. It's not in the "notes" tab either, I'm afraid.

    alt text

    Hope this helps.

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