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Local Folder Metadata File


Media Gallery Manager (MGM) enables to replicate folder structures on local harddrives to your online galleries. Albums in online Galleries like the Galleries on Zenfolio can hold additional information like caption, categories and keywords. Such additional information is called metadata.

In MGM metadata can be assigned to folders on a local harddrive as well. This is especially useful when one wants to prepare all information about galleries and photos on a local harddrive and then synchronize all automatically to the account on your online gallery such as your account on Zenfolio.

MGM can read metadata from a local folder out of a special purpose file stored within this folder which we call metadata file. The metadata file has a fixed filename, _mgmfolder.txt by default. The filename starts with underscore so that it can be easily found in file explorers if the files are sorted in alphanumeric order as on most operation systems the underscore character is sorted before any digit or letter.

The metadata file holds additional information for the folder, where it is stored in. For example the file
photos/gallery/_mgmfolder.txt defines the metadata for the folder gallery. The metadata file is a plain text file that contains one property per line.

Each metadata property is specified as a name/value pair, the name of the property and its assigned value. Each property respectively name/value pair must be written to a separate line, so that one line specifies only one property. The name of the property is separated from its value by an equal sign (the = character). The name of a property starts with the first character of a line until the first occurence of an = sign. The value starts with the first character after the first = sign and ends with the end of line (EOL).

Lines starting with the # character are interpreted as comments and are ignored when reading metadata from the file.

An example metadata file would look like this:

_mgmfolder.txt
# this is an example metadata file
Title=Adam & Eve's wedding
Caption=The wedding of Adam & Eve in the Elvis Presley Chapel of Las Vegas.
Keywords=wedding,ceremony,bride,groom


Additionally to the standard metadata properties like title, caption and keywords the special properties CustomReference and Password are supported.

Currently the following properties are supported:

Name Value Format Example
Title Plain text without formatting. Special characters that are not ASCII characters must be specified in Unicode like \u0123 Title=Adam & Eve's Wedding
Caption Either Plain text without formatting or HTML formatted text enclosed within <HTML> and </HTML> tags. Caption=<html> <h1>Adam & Eve's Wedding</h1>
The wedding took place on Sun, May 8th 2000 in the Elvis Presley wedding chapel of Las Vegas.</html>
Keywords A list of keywords separated by comma (the , character). Any space characters or quotation marks are included in the keywords. In the example to the right Wedding Chapel is treated as one keyword including a space character. Keywords=Bride,Wedding Chapel,Groom
CustomReference The document part of a custom URL without leading slash. CustomReference=weddings/adam-n-eve
Password Password in clear text that shall be assigned to the group or gallery when it is created. Password=secret1234


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