Flash! Poof! I thought I just discovered a hidden search gem in my OS X Mavericks system. One of the coolest things in Evernote is uploaded photos with text in the picture, becomes searchable for those words (it does some magic OCR on your images).
Now that is magic.
This morning I was seeking an image on my computer that I as not sure is there– I had used it on a post about the saying “The cobbler’s children have no shoes”. On a whim I put “cobbler” into the Spotlight search in the finder. I did not find the image I was looking for (insert Star Wars robots reference), but was surprised that an image titled IMG_9119.JPG would appear on the search result- in a photo with the word “cobbler” in the picture.
Before I got excited and tweeting like a proud papa, I wanted to check a few things. This is one of my own photos, and because of the way I process and save my photos in Aperture, the titles and captions get written to the image file as meta data. Maybe Aperture was only picking up the word there.
How do you find meta data? Well I remembered the Get Info command on the file icon gives some data, and look, under “More Info” is the title and caption I composed n Aperture
What is useful about this, and why I use it, is that this info is nicely used if you upload the image to WordPress, if the title, and caption are in the meta data, it populates the Media Fields:
So while my dreams of Spotlight actually finding text to search on in my image, I am glad to know that the meta data that travels with the image go with it everywhere. I also include a creative commons license statement in there, but its a field that the Apple OS or WordPress does not extract.
But the metadata goes with the image.
Not quite super magic, but still neat.
Imagine me, getting excited about metadata. Weird.
I heart metadata, too!