I renamed a pdf file within File Explorer from X to Y. When I open the properties pop-up for the file on File Explorer, I see that the 'name' of the file is Y. However when I view the metadata for the file, the 'title' is X. Why does this happen?
I expected the title in the metadata to be Y, not X.
32 Answers
Why should the title value change if filename and title are different things?
This is the default behavior.
3The metadata is part of the file contents.
This presents the following problems:
An application developer can pretty much use any method they can dream of to embed metadata in a file. So the way to read and update metadata is often gatewayed by the application developer, or might require a lot of effort reverse engineering or reading documentation.
Sometimes metadata isn't simple to map to a filename. If you rename an MP3 file, for example, a program isn't going to be able to tell if you want to update the MP3's title tag, song tag, etc. You're expected to use a tag editor or metadata editor specific to MP3 files.
Modifying the contents of a file by renaming it isn't necessarily something that's expected and probably not something Microsoft wants to take responsibility for if bad things happen.
All that adds up to this: you need to use an editor or the program that edits a specific file type to make those changes in the file itself.
In the mid to late 00's, Microsoft was trying to solve this problem with a technology called WinFS, which would have defined APIs that extract file metadata, put it in a separate database, and allow any application to work with it. I think there were previews in Longhorn which was the Windows Vista preview. However they never released a working version.
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