Hello,
I was wondering what The metadata values can contain absolutely anything you like -- but you're recommended to keep it simple and reasonably short.
listed on the metadata page really means?
Here is my use case (which is part of a larger solution)...
I've been storing my photos in git annex for a while (years perhaps), I (or actually the wife) tried to find one and couldn't, so I'm thinking I need to add metadata (Tags and captions, etc) to each picture. I was looking for ways to do so. I was actually considering using gthumb or shotwell or similar to create the tags and somehow pull that out and associate it with the file (either with a plugin or program) and then sort out how to distribute the metadata with the pics. The git annex metadata seems like a reasonable solution for keeping metadata with the pictures. The question is in this case, how long can the text in say a caption tag before git-annex has problems? I could probably do something like caption- to handle really long captions, but then captions are short by definition, so perhaps I should say description instead. And for this particular use case, I am aware this doesn't solve the problem of actually creating the data, just trying to sort out if get annex metadata to the right solution to tie the metadata to a pic, err file.
There's no particular size limit for metadata. But things may not scale well past some size.
Having a big metadata value could make git-annex be a little slow when dealing with metadata, since it has to parse the metadata log file. So if you stored say, 1 mb in metadata, that's one mb of disk IO and data processing every time git-annex looks at the metadata for that file.
All the metadata for a file will also be buffered in memory when git-annex is looking at that file's metadata. So
git-annex view
would use 1 mb or so more memory in the above example. (But git-annex only looks at one file's metadata at a time, so its memory use won't grow if you have a lot of files with metadata.)Also of course, the metadata is stored in git, and so it will make your git repository bigger.
I would not expect any reasonable description of a photo to be large enough for its size to be a problem.
I'd even feel ok with putting the full text of a license in as metadata (GPL is 30kb, and git would deduplicate redundant license metadata).
Thanks Joey.
Now to sort out how to create the data -- james