Metadata

Metadata is information that a file can have attached to it. You can attach information such as comments, title, author, tags, etc.

Metadata information is stored in metadata fields. You manage the fields from inside the “Control Panel » Files » Metadata » Field Sets” administrative section.

When setting up a metadata field, you can define a list of options. The user will be presented with a predefined list to choose from. If you do not define a list of values, the user will be free to type in any value he wishes.

Every metadata field needs to be part of a metadata field set. Field sets can be used to group more fields.

To automatically associate certain field sets with certain types of files, you define metadata file types. You might want, for example, to have a set with fields such as “Photographer”, “Camera”, “Location” associated with image files, so that when you edit the metadata for an image file you are presented by default with these fields.

By defining a field set as generic, its fields will be automatically displayed inside the metadata window, no matter what “file type” the user selects for the file.

Metadata information can be displayed in the list of files as new detail columns, by clicking on the Options button on the top toolbar, click on Choose details, then select from the list the metadata information that you want to display.

Metadata fields, field sets, and file types created by independent admin users are available only to these users and the user accounts they create.

FileRun reads metadata from files at upload time. If files were uploaded to the server from outside FileRun, you can manually trigger the metadata indexing in two ways:

1. From the FileRun user interface, signed in as FileRun superuser, right-click the folder you wish to index, choose Information → Control Panel, then choose Index file metadata and click Run. This will scan the files in that folder and index them.

2. From the command line, see the metadata_index.php script on this page.