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Comment by IsmaOlvey | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I wouldn't want my filenames to be changed (and in addition, one would likely run into problems with the path length limit, at least on Windows).

On the other hand, using sidecar files would essentially mean giving up freedom to move/rename your files. Sure, you could move/rename the metadata files manually, but it'd be much more work, and you're bound to mess up sooner or later.

I'm not sure how to solve both those points without making the application "own" the files (as e.g. Camlistore does).

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NTFS can have additional data streams associated with a file. It's used for stuff like the warnings you get when you try to run an executable downloaded from the Internet. This seems like a perfect solution for me, at least on Windows.

It's not just the correct way on windows, it's the correct way on macOS, and any other file system with resource forks or extensible file metadata.

However file metadata is usually pretty poorly understood by most developers (based on a personal sample of my past experiences) and file system resource forks are even less understood...

Perfect is the enemy of good and all that sort of thing ...

I would say it mostly misunderstood by those not raised coding GUI applications for Mac OS, Windows, Atari or Amiga systems.

The problem with Alternate Data Streams is interoperability. In many cases, the data will silently be lost when copying between different file systems and/or operating systems. I believe Windows itself will warn you when trying to perform an operation that would discard alternate data streams (for example copying from NTFS to FAT), but many tools would likely silently strip it.

Think of things like any of the cloud drives, bittorrent, screen-sharing or IM software. Are they aware of ADS (or equivalent for that platform). What would the right thing to do be when syncing between platforms that have support, and ones that do not?

Well, this is open source, so I guess this could be added:

https://github.com/tagspaces/tagspaces

Windows even has a standard NTFS metadata field for Tags. You can display it as a column in File Explorer's detail view. You can edit it in the Properties > Details sheet.

Outside of Office sometimes trying to encourage using it to make searching easier and Windows sometimes using it for ID3 tags from audio files, I've never really seen anyone try to use it.

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