About "age" filter(tag) in Foxtrot

[elvi...@gmail.com]

Which metadata of the files does the age filter use?

Does it use the Creation date, modified date, or some other data?

I know now that Foxtrot can correctly identify the Author of the file from the XML metadata of the PDF file. This is very wonderful feature. I would be also glad if it can use the "year" tag, in place of the creation and modification dates for files which contain a year metadata; PDF files specifically. 

[FoxTrot Engineering]

elvi...@gmail.com wrote:

>Which metadata of the files does the *age *filter use?

>Does it use the Creation date, modified date, or some other data?

File's modification date.

>I know now that Foxtrot can correctly identify the *Author* of the file

>from the XML metadata of the PDF file. This is very wonderful feature. I
>would be also glad if it can use the "year" tag, in place of the creation

>and modification dates for files which contain a *year **metadata; PDF
>files *specifically.

This metadata is not returned by the PDF Spotlight metadata importer that FoxTrot uses by default.
We could use Xpdf instead to parse PDF files (and you can actually use it by pressing the command and option keys when launching FoxTrot, and click "manage third-party metadata importers), but this is slower, and even in this case we still use the file modification date for consistency reasons.

>I have also some interesting absurd properties with Foxtro pro. Indexing
>two identical files (duplicates), one of them ranks higher, the other one
>ranks about 10 steps lower. I don't know what is happening.

Are you 100% sure they are exact duplicates (eg., is the file size in bytes the same)? Some other metadata can also modify the ranking: Finder tags, Finder comments, file name, and parent folder name.

> I would note one odd behavior. When I adjust the slider and redo the
> search for "around one line", I get different return results randomly.
> Sometimes I get 7 hits, sometimes I get 19 hits.

The proximity slider is continuous; the tooltip and the graduations materialize 5 positions, from "very near" to "around a few pages", but this is only informative. In fact, even on the leftmost position, the found words can be logically contiguous but not on the same line, paragraph or page, and on the rightmost position, they can be on the same very long paragraph.


Jérôme - CTM Engineering


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[Des Bw]

>we still use the file modification date for consistency reasons.

The modification date is dysfunctional because we modify files everyday. But, using the Creation date would actually help us filter publications of different years/decades. In the current state, it is impossible to filter with the publication dates. 

The Creation metadata can also be changed and aligned with the publication year with the metadata editing tools such as exiftool.

[FoxTrot Engineering]

We may consider letting the user toggle the date used (modification date vs creation date) in the age category pane, in a future version.

However, with FoxTrot Pro and since version 6.5, you can also add a "then filter by date" criterion, where you can add flexible and exact dates conditions, for both dates.

Thanks for your feedback


Jérôme - CTM Engineering

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