File label does unwanted modification of other file label

I hope the topic description is fair enough but, being weak on tech terms, I struggle with self-evident descriptions. Sorry.

First, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and awesome New Year, and that 2018 will be a prosperous year for everyone.
Second, I hope you purchased the yacht of your dreams with my last Dopus subscription, Leo.
:sunny:

My problem is :
• I assign a variety of colour labels to my filenames. They mean things to me and make traversing and managing the gazillion files on each HDDs a whole lot easier. A lot of work is involved in assigning the correct colour to each filename (if I was a cat, 10 of my lifetimes).

• If I change the contents of a file, Dopus changes the colour from red or purple or blue (eg.) to bold black, indicating visually that the file's contents was changed today.

• Tomorrow, when it's no longer today (brilliant, eh, Watson?), the black bold reverts to regular black, losing my painstaking color-coding, inducing aggro, and giving me heart palpitations..

I get that I can prevent this from happening by going to Settings > Preferences > Favorites and Recent >
Label Assignments > Uncheck the label filter ("Modified within last 24 hrs")

But then I lose a way to see recent changes to the file content by browsing the files (yes, I can use the "Today" for the modified column of the lister and sort on that but there's something to be said for seeing it in place, via the label, which no longer exists... colour gone !)

If I check that label filter again, enabling the bold black for today's file changes, is there a way of forcing Dopus (tomorrow) to revert to the original colour it was before yesterday's change, rather than revert to a regular black?

Thanks for any help.

It sounds like the problem is in how you have defined your labels.

Can you show us how they are all set up?

Greetings, Leo.
Thank you for the reply.
:slight_smile:
I hope this is what you mean.

(I'm not well right now... hence the delayed reply)
:slight_smile:

Sorry, first URL doesn't display automatically.

I should have mentioned that - at this stage - none are setup to assign automatically.
All labels are applied manually by me (except the last 24 hrs one, of course).

The assigned labels screenshot has just a few displayed... dunno why... there's thousands of files/folders with the labels.

I think what's happening is that when you modify the files, whatever you modify them with deletes the old file and writes a completely new file. And that program is not preserving the old file's metadata, so the label is lost.

It isn't caused by the "modified within last 24 hours" label. If you disable that entirely, I think you'll find that when you edit things with the editor you're using, the labels are lost immediately.

You could ask the people who make the editor to make it preserve metadata (NTFS Alternate Data Streams) by copying it from the old file to the new one when an edit is made, but they may not want to do that.

You could also turn off Automatically store labels in the file system if possible, which will make Opus store new labels as a list in Preferences, instead of within the files themselves. But that will also mean that if you move or rename a file, it will lose its label. (It also means if you delete a file and, a year later, make a new file in the same place with the same name, that file will inherit the old file's label, if it is still assigned to that path in Preferences.)

If you change that, it only affects new or modified labels from that point on; existing labels that are part of the files themselves will still be in the filesystem. You can use the Find tool to find all files with labels and then re-apply them to move them from one mode to the other.

G'day, Leo
Thanks for the reply and making it easy to understand.
:slight_smile:

"...whatever you modify them with deletes the old file and writes a completely new file..."
Ok... that's Photoshop (in recent cases).
They're not going to show me any concern.
:frowning:

So it's not Dopus's fault but, nevertheless, it's a bit hole in the label system (for me anyway).
ie.
• file with current metadata exists
• external editor deletes old file
• external editor writes file with new metadata to same filename as just deleted, in place

So the deletion by Photoshop is the problem, and Dopus can't do anything about that.
Something like this would be too messy and have a zillion holes in its use ? :
• if a file is deleted, temporarily save it's filename/metadata
• if the filename is reused within 10 seconds for a new file, Dopus replaces the new file's metatdata with the old file's metadata ?
I know you're probably rolling on the floor laughing at 'babies in computerland' but that was a desperate call, Leo, haha.

So, I just have to live with it.

Always grateful for your expert advice, Leo. Thank you !
:slight_smile:

That would have to be done by the program that deletes and replaces the file, i.e. Photoshop.

Ok.
It's that I don't understand how these things work behind the scenes.
I'm really tech-illiterate. (Sometimes I don't post problems here for fear of looking like an idiot).
I "assumed" (bad dog !) that editors would make a request to the file manager (Windows Explorer/Dopus) to delete the file and the file manager would do the actual deletion and report "job done" to the editor... so I thought Dopus would be at the centre of everything.

Must be really easy for a black hat hacker to drop a little app that will press President Trumps nuclear button...

No, that happens at a lower level and is all handled by the operating system (Windows) and filesystem (NTFS). Opus and Explorer won't know about the deletion until it has already happened, at which point the metadata is already deleted and they could only restore it if they were caching all the metadata of every file on any drive (and network drive, etc.) that you might possibly edit a file on.

Leo, please forgive my holding onto this like a bulldog on the postman's leg but there's stuff that I don't understand.
First, the assumption that Photoshop creates entirely new metadata doesn't seem to be the case.

For a file that I worked in Photoshop before :
•1• locate a file without "labels"
•2• apply a label -> colour the filename red (the "02 missing issue" in label definitions above)
•3• select that file -> F9 -> copy contents of the metadata panel
(note : there's no metadata in there for any label, as far as I can see)

•4• read that same file into Photoshop and make some changes to it
•5• save it
•6• select that file -> F9 -> view contents of the metadata panel
•7• compare the metadata in step 6 to the metadata in step 3

Result :
• only difference between Opus metadata displays is the date modified (everything else is preserved)
• the filename is back to black (red is gone), as before (what prompted me opening this thread originally)

So, my confusion is :

  1. Not seeing where the label metadata is stored before Photoshop even touches it
  2. The fact that Photoshop seems to preserve the metadata anyway as only "date modified" changes.

I'm now assuming that if the label metadata was visible/accessible in that panel, Photoshop would preserve it.

So, where is it and why doesn't it display red after an app modifies the file????

Sorry for being a pain...
:frowning:

Labels are stored as an Alternate Data Stream which is a feature of NTFS. You can think of it kind of as a secondary file, one that's attached to the primary file (and ordinarily hidden from the user).

It's "metadata" in the sense that it's data about the file rather than the actual file contents. Not to be confused with the metadata displayed by the metadata panel in Opus, which is also data about the file but is mostly (particularly with image files) stored as part of the actual file contents.themselves.

Photoshop will (or should) preserve the second type of metadata because it's in the actual file data itself. But ADS files are separate from the main file; they need to be explicitly read into memory and then written back to disk as a separate step to preserve them when the primary file they're attached to is deleted and replaced with another one.

You can use the free Streams tool to display alternate data streams. You'll find they're used quite a bit.

Hey, thanks for the reply and details.
But it's beyond me.
I don't want to spend a lot of time (months, with my present knowledge) trying to understand the primitive pre-Windows methods for just the one situation.... and never use it again, haha.
I'm starting to think keeping the integrity of the labels in Opus is impossible when it's stored in a second(ary) ADS file which apps might not feel is important enough to process.

Maybe I can amaze a hot girl on Saturday night by talking matter-of-factly about Alternate Data Streams... but probably not [she'll be able to discuss it in depth :frowning: ]

Ok, I'll drop the topic now.
Thanks again for the assist, Jon.
I really appreciate it.

You can always switch to the other method of storing labels, but each method has its pros and cons.