SUMMARY [XDG Extended Attributes guidelines][1] include metadata about files that is supported on the file system level. Many programs attach this metadata to downloaded or produced files, and it would seem an essential feature for a file manager to provide a way to view and edit this metadata. In particular, these xattrs are of high relevance: user.xdg.origin.url: for files downloaded from a url. user.xdg.robots.index: "true" if a file is included in indexing, "false" otherwise user.xdg.robots.backup: "true" if a file is included in backup, "false" otherwise user.xdg.language user.xdg.creator user.xdg.publisher user.xdg.origin.email.subject user.xdg.origin.email.from user.xdg.origin.email.message-id [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/
(In reply to AvidSeeker from comment #0) > ... Many programs attach this metadata to downloaded or produced files ... If you have any examples of code that does this (as extended attributes), it would be nice to try. You can see what metadata is extracted and indexed (by baloo) if you do a balooshow -x oneofyourfiles.odf (or .doc, .pdf, .mp3, .jpg etc). This is generally embedded metadata though and it will also appear in Dolphin's F11 information panel. You can search for such "embedded" metadata, for example by: baloosearch author:Carroll Baloo and Dolphin handle a subset of extended attributes: user.xdg.tags, user.xdg.comment and user.baloo.rating and you can search for these by: baloosearch tag:Wonderland It pays to be careful (and do regular backups of your xattr data with getfattr), it's rather too easy to do something to a file and it's read and written back without the xattr. Rotate an image with Gwenview, you'll lose any tags and ratings you might have attached: Bug 431146
Related and maybe worth a reference: Bug 440752