git-annex's metadata works best when files have a lot of useful metadata attached to them.

To make git-annex automatically set the year and month when adding files, run git config annex.genmetadata true.

A git commit hook can be set up to extract lots of metadata from files like photos, mp3s, etc.

  1. Install the extract utility, from http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/
    apt-get install extract
  2. Download pre-commit-annex and install it in your git-annex repository as .git/hooks/pre-commit-annex.
    Remember to make the script executable!
  3. Run: git config metadata.extract "artist album title camera_make video_dimensions"

Now any fields you list in metadata.extract to will be extracted and stored when files are committed.

To get a list of all possible fields, run: extract -L | sed 's/ /_/g'

By default, if a git-annex already has a metadata field for a file, its value will not be overwritten with metadata taken from files. To allow overwriting, run: git config metadata.overwrite true

http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/fits might be an even better choice than libextractor. We use it in work and its not too bad, but it can be slow to startup due to the JVM.

is there a way for this to be done globally, without having to install and configure the hook for each repository? it seems like a fairly useful feature that could be factored in git-annex itself (as opposed to be shipped as a shell script)...

also, is there a way to retroactively parse the tags from existing files (as opposed to only new files added to the repo).

thanks

Comment by https://id.koumbit.net/anarcat Tue Apr 1 00:18:10 2014

@anarcat, I have modified pre-commit-annex so if it's passed already annexed files, it'll extract their metadata.

So this can be used to add metadata to files added before you installed the hook, or if you've configured more fields to be extracted.

Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Thu Apr 17 16:15:07 2014
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