file comments in vista

  • Thread starter Thread starter Boyd
  • Start date Start date
B

Boyd

Hi,

When I view files in XP, I can rt-click->PROPERTIES->SUMMARY to add/change
file comments then I can enable the viewing of comments within that directory
to see the comments.

In VISTA, browsing the same directory, I see the comments for only some of
the files and cannot find a method to add/modify the comments.
Nor do I see anything that would cause the display of only "some" of the
file comments that were defined using xp.

How is this done in VISTA? A) create comments; B) view all comments
 
Boyd said:
Hi,

When I view files in XP, I can rt-click->PROPERTIES->SUMMARY to add/change
file comments then I can enable the viewing of comments within that directory
to see the comments.

In VISTA, browsing the same directory, I see the comments for only some of
the files and cannot find a method to add/modify the comments.
Nor do I see anything that would cause the display of only "some" of the
file comments that were defined using xp.

How is this done in VISTA? A) create comments; B) view all comments
Click to expand...

That works the same way that it does in XP.
 
Thanks for the reply, however: apparantly not!

I have 2 PCs beside each other.
One runs XP. It can view and change the comments on all the files of a
server shared directory.

The other runs VISTA. It can view the comments for only 1 of 7 files and
cannot modify the comments of any!

For VISTA, other than enabling the "comments" column in the view, there must
be something else one must do to see and modify the comments defined for
files.

In VISTA, I get a very different properties - dialog box depending on the
"type" of file being viewed. With XP, not so much.
In VIsta, none of the dialog box templates has a "SUMMARY" tab. No where
can I find a "comments" edit cell.

XP does not have this issue.

There's got to be something about the VISTA setup that is preventing me from
acessing this file information.
 
Old thread, but the newest that I dug up in a search. Since there was no
satisfactory resolution, let me try to document this problem in some
technical detail for future searchers.

In XP, you could use the Properties->Summary tab in XP Explorer to edit
extended file metadata (Title, Authors, Comments, etc.) on *any file*. This
information was stored in the secondary NTFS stream, and could be selected to
appear on the "Details" folder view in Explorer. Vista Explorer no longer
supports reading metadata out of the secondary NTFS stream. The metadata
hasn't been deleted -- it's still present in the secondary NTFS stream -- but
it's just not visible in Vista Explorer.

Instead, Vista Explorer takes a completely different approach, storing
extended file metadata directly inside the file itself. e.g. JPEG files get
the metadata stored in EXIF. The benefit of this is that the extended
metadata now travels with the file. The XP method was not robust to any
operation that drops the NTFS secondary stream, such as emailing a file to
someone, or copying it to a USB stick running the FAT32 filesystem. The
downside is that this requires the file format to be parsed.

The most obvious problem right now is PDF. In XP, Adobe Reader installed a
shell extension which read the data out of the file. (This only appeared in
the read-only "Details" folder view, not in the read-write "Summary" tab in
the Properties dialog.) Because of the architectural changes in Vista, the
shell extension no longer works. Now, 15 months after Vista RTM'd, Adobe
Reader 8.1.2 still does not include a Vista-compatible extension. I suspect
Adobe has pushed this off to version 9. There are also other problems: Adobe
Reader has always been read-only for document properties. Plus, PDF also has
a DRM feature which allows document properties to be made uneditable.

Vista includes, out-of-the-box, read-write shell extensions for a bunch of
image formats, as well as Microsoft Office documents and XPS. Vista does not
include a PDF extension out-of-the-box. It's unclear whose fault this is.
As Raymond Chen might say, users will always blame Microsoft first, and the
ISV second. Microsoft could have garned considerable PR points if it had
developed a PDF read-write extension, and allowed Adobe to play the bad guys
(as occurred with "Save as PDF" in Office 2007).
 
Back
Top