When you right click a file, such as a power point presentation, I expect to be able to see the author of the file and other such metadata. This does not seem to happen in gnome / nautilus. This is standard behaviour in Windows.
Any idea how I can see a files metadata?
Best Answer
Files such as the Portable Document Format (PDF), images, audio and video files the metadata you are interested in can be viewed by right clicking the file, click properties and then click on the relevant tab to see the kind of metadata you asked about.
For PDFs click the Document tab
For images click the Image tab
For audio click the Audio tab
For video click the Audio/Video tab
For some Office documents you will not be able to view the kind of metadata you asked about by right clicking, you can install the utility called extract from the repositories and and run it from the command line, the metadata, if any is contained in the file, will be displayed in your terminal.
Example for using the extract utility:
I have an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet called 555.ods, From the directory where the file is located I run;
The result below is the metadata in the file printed to stdout.
Currently, libextractor supports the following formats: HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2 (DOC, XLS, PPT), OpenOffice (sxw), StarOffice (sdw), DVI, MAN, MP3 (ID3v1 and ID3v2), OGG, WAV, EXIV2, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, ELF, REAL, RIFF (AVI), MPEG, QT and ASF.
This is a simple Nautilus script that invokes extract and displays the result with zenity, then with a right-click I can get that info. If you want, the script I wrote is this (please note that I'm not sure that the line "IFS=$'\n'" is actually required, a bash expert could comment on that)