Movies taken with Android phones store their location metadata (and probably others) in ways that are ignored by Apple's ecosystem (QuickTime Player, Photos.app).
I am considering creating a Spotlight importer so that this metadata is available to the sytem. But I have a couple of questions:
- Can a Spotlight importer add new data (like location) to the data that the standard importer already captured? Or would the new importer need to take over the whole data gathering? If so, would macOS allow that?
- Would that Spotlight importer be somehow used by e.g. Photos.app and QT Player to capture the location? Or would this end up in Spotlight "knowing" the location but Photos.app ignoring it?
- If so, maybe there is something more broadly useful than a Spotlight importer?
Hello @hmijail,
First, as noted in the Spotlight Importer Programming Guide:
"You can’t create a Spotlight importer that overrides an existing file type. For example, you can’t write a JPEG Spotlight plug-in because Apple provides one. Only one importer is allowed per uniform type identifiers (UTIs)."
Additionally, as you suspected (and if you could provide a Spotlight Importer for those file formats), I would not expect every app on the system to utilize the metadata your Spotlight Importer provided.
maybe there is something more broadly useful than a Spotlight importer?
I'm not aware of anything that would help you achieve your goal here (short of writing an app or a tool that users could send their files through to adjust the metadata), please file an enhancement request using Feedback Assistant.
-- Greg
