Does anyone know if tagging in Mac OS Mavericks is open meta?

I assume that it is but I just want to make sure.

Wow that would be really be lame to not have OS support for Open meta. Do you have a copy of Maverick? Is there some way you could confirm it's support or lack there of? Microsoft added support for tagging many years ago in Windows Vista but I found their implementation to be pretty terrible. I was hoping the reason that Apple waited so long to add tagging support was that they were trying to get it right.

The more I use tagging across the system the more I realize the importance of having the maker of the OS be in charge of setting a standard so that it will work well across all the 3rd party products. Using closed systems like Lightroom and Firefox is a really poor solution. I am curious how Apple's tagging solution works on iCloud. Do you know if Open Meta tags can be used in conjunction with web apps such as the iWork apps?

I thought it was really nice how they merged labels and tags together. I never use labeling but now that it works hand in hand with tagging it looks really useful.

Do your openmeta tags show up in the Finder with the new tagging feature? I know that in previous versions of MacOS you could use "tag:keyword" to search for open meta tags but I was wondering if they show up in the Finder sidebar or under the drop down menu of the search box. It is interesting how the search box comes up with that drop down menu and then divides the search results by file name or by tag. I could see a feature like that being useful in Tembo. Right now the tag searching functionality is a little bit hidden in that program.

Does Safari provide a way for you to tag your bookmarks? That would be awesome to tag a bookmark and then have it show up in a search app like HS rather then having to go to the browser to find the tagged bookmark.

How do I migrate OpenMeta tags to Maverick tags?

"But you can reveal the bookmark file in the Finder and tag it there."
That is a pretty annoying work around. I hope Apple fixes that. The mail app probably doesn't have tagging support either?

What about the Apple products that use keywords? Do they show up in the Finder and HS? I am thinking of programs like Final Cut, iPhoto, Aperture, etc.

Will 3rd party apps be able to convert their internal tags over to Maverick tags as well? If so can I search for all the tags I saved in MacJournal, Lightroom, and Firefox in the Finder and HS if the developers chooses to make their tags compatible with the new tagging system?

Mail DOES work with tags. I went back to Mail after using T-Bird because in Mail, it works with metadata. Using a freeware app called "Tagger", AppleScript, and Keyboard Maestro, I can look at a Mail message and use my hot key combo to trigger the script on any .emlx (Mail) message). I like this beacause then I can have a search in HS to check on any progress notes that I have tagged.

I am still on 10.6.8. When all the smoke clears and I am confident again that the new system will work as advertised I will (probably advance my OS again if for no other reason than to get the fr4eshest version of Apples Mail, now that I again use it heavily.

Fair disclaimer: I got this script somewhere else (cant remember) but I put it in the code and it works very well. Just dont ask me to tell you how to tweak it.

Applescript:

tell application "Mail"
    set msgURL to ""
    set founderror to ""
    repeat with msg in (selection as list)
        set theId to id of msg
        set myURL to (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin ~/Library/Mail \"kMDItemFSName = '" & theId & ".emlx'\"")
        if myURL is "" then
            set testURL to (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin ~/Library/Mail \"kMDItemFSName = '" & theId & ".partial.emlx'\"")
            if testURL is not "" then
                set founderror to "One or more of the selected messages has only been partially downloaded. All messages to be tagged must be downloaded fully for tagging to work reliably."
            else
                set founderror to "Spotlight was unable to find a local copy of the selected message."
            end if
            exit repeat
        else
            set myURL to quoted form of (POSIX path of myURL)
            set msgURL to msgURL & " " & myURL
        end if
    end repeat
end tell

if founderror is not "" then
    display dialog founderror with title "Whoops!" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
else
    tell application "Finder" to set appPath to application file id "org.hasseg.Tagger" as string -- grab path using app file ID for Tagger
    set command to quoted form of (POSIX path of appPath) & "/Contents/MacOS/Tagger -f " & msgURL
    do shell script command
end if

That is great that you found a tagging solution that works good for you. However I was hoping to have something that is really basic and straight forward. I trust that Apple will come up with a solution in Maverick Mail soon.

Thanks for the update.

I will probably do the 2nd option as I want all my old tags to show up in the Finder.

Macademic summarizes the first observations on how it actually workshere. Looks like it takes some time for OS X to decipher the previously added OpenMeta tags. Some software works more smoothly with Mavericks tags than other.
[image on academicgtd.files.wordpress.com]

Wow, this is great to be able to merge OpenMeta and Mavericks tags. I will probably start using Houdah Spot. Thank you so much!

@acherp

Thanks for posting the article. I can see how at some point OpenMeta will just go away as tagging handled by the OS should work much better.  I have heard a lot of people talk about how they don't think Mavericks is a huge upgrade. To me it seems like the built OS tagging support is worth it for just that one feature alone.

@Pierre
Can you please explain to me what "Merge Open Meta & Mavericks Tags" does? Does this turn all the Open Meta tags into Mavericks tags? I just upgraded to mavericks and would like to switch to the Mavericks tagging system so that I don't have to try to remember if I saved a tag as Openmeta or as Mavericks every time I perform a search. Can I convert the openmeta tags over somehow?

Just out of curiosity why would anyone want to keep Openmeta and Mavericks tags separate? To me it seems like having the two formats fragmented can only make things more difficult.

The way I have things set up right now is I save in mavericks tags format from the save as menu. When I go to search for the file later in HS will it then pick up the Openmeta tags that have in the same tag as well? Do I still have to type the same tag in a field for Mavericks and another field for Openmeta after it has been synced?

I am starting to get how it works now. I think it makes the most sense for me to search by "Keywords & Tags". I just realized that the merge feature only applies to the search you are doing at the moment. It doesn't automatically merge all the tags on your computer when you select it. Therefore if I use another search app like Pixa or Finder that still only search one type of tag they will continue to only search that one tag type.

I can see this is an old topic but my question relates to Mac Finder tags and the 'Keywords' metadata field present in image files.

I was very excited when I watched an old YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-NUaVuIrjI
demonstrating the merging of Open Meta Tags and Mavericks Tags as this is pretty much what I want to accomplish. However when I tried to do it using HoudaSpot on a newer operating system, that function wasn't available.

I'm currently running MacOS Sierra 10.12 and the names of these metadata types seems to have changed but I still want this basic functionality. More precisely, I want to be able to take Tags that you can include at the file level (with the Finder) and insert/append that into the IPTC metadata field titled "Keywords" in the image file. Is that possible?

Also, if I find an older Mac running Mavericks OS, will the latest version of HoudaSpot, currently 4.3.4, give me the option to Merge data in these two fields?

Thanks Pierre.

OK, I'll try HoudaSpot 3.9

Yes, I researched and found ExifTool as well but was hoping to find software with a GUI that could do this function.
That's why I got excited when I saw the video demonstrating this feature in HoudaSpot and was disappointed when I couldn't do the same with my configuration.

It seems I have more to learn regarding the differences with OpenMeta and IPTC.

I don't know if it will help but, to mention it, I have hundreds of older photos and am in a lull with my photography at the moment. I will return to it eventually but, what I have found useful is to use HoudahSpot's ability to save template searches and in those, I have added criteria that the Finder can see such as camera model contains to show me what a specific camera took and also according to date ranges. 

That is, I use Finder tags now exclusively. I can add tags to photos using HoudahSpot. That does not directly answer or solve your issue with IPTC photo data but, setting it up using HoudahSpot has been working quite well for me. And, again, I am not currently active with generating new images just now so, your mileage may vary.

I now use FastRawViewer. I used to have  license for PhotoMechanic. FastRawViwer is much cheaper and is very very good. I only have JPEGs and no raw files so yes this works very well for more than raw files. FastRawViwer is what I use to edit my photo data when I want to go that route.

[FastRawViewer](https://www.fastrawviewer.com)

Hi Member #601,

Thanks for your input and insights with FastRawViewer.

I also have and use PhotoMechanic on a regular basis but still find myself searching for a tool, with a graphical user interface, that will take finder level tags and write them to an IPTC, EXIF or XMP field.

So far, ExifTool is the only Mac software that I can find with this capability but its command line interface is less than ideal. The finder level tag data needs to be written into one of the metadata fields mentioned to be compatible with our production workflow so unfortunately I can't rely on just the finder level tags as you've been able to adopt.

The search continues...

Cheers,