Flexible Photo Organization Software? 131
Matthew Wecksell asks: "Several years after getting a digital camera, I find myself with far too many pictures to keep track of, with multiple folders titled 'At the Beach' and so on. Picassa will not let me assign multiple labels to a picture and then search against those labels the way iTunes will with my music (eg: Show me all pictures with '"Grandma Foo" and not "Grandma Bar"' to find pics that have just one of my two grandmothers). Also, I'd like to find a solution that lets me export the meta data or keep it in the picture files, not a proprietary database, so that in ten or twenty years, I can use another program on another platform and still have useful tags assigned to my pictures that I'm taking today — I have no interest in re-tagging my pics. Has anyone found a good solution to the picture organization problem? Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?"
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Now the metadata, on the other hand, is the problem with iTunes and iPhoto.
One word: ACDSee (Score:1)
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I don't think Peregr1n was implying [slashdot.org] that iTunes cannot rip to MP3. Peregr1n was replying to someone who made the mistake of imporitng/tagging 3000 photos in iPhoto and cannot easily transfer the tags [slashdot.org] (re-tagging would take hours). I'm
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If I recall correctly, iPhoto is scriptable with AppleScript and Python. It shouldn't be too difficult (relative term, I know) to extract the information this way.
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"me too" (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, I have all my pictures on one network share. On desktop PC "A" I arrange my pictures into albums using labels. on Desktop PC "B", you have to repeat this work. A central (or even just exportable) database of this would be hands.
Along with multiple labels
and possibility of heirarchical albums structure.
Re:"me too" (Score:5, Informative)
And yes - it has Picasaweb export!
Additionally it's a new project and is actively developed. Tags are kept in database, so network sharing will probably work with good configuration. Changes are kept like in Picasa - it always keeps the original file without modifications.
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F-Spot uses Mono (Score:4, Informative)
But for user awareness I'd like to point out that F-Spot is developed using Mono. You of course, can make your own decision about whether you are comfortable with this dependency.
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It's already there. Update Picasa through the Help menu entry or download it directly from http://picasa.google.com/ [google.com]
-clueless
Kimdaba/KPhotoAlbum (Score:1)
http://kphotoalbum.org/ [kphotoalbum.org]
Photoshop Elements (Score:3, Informative)
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However it does not do that in realtime with tags as it does with caption. You need to periodically launch the command "write tags and info to photo" that will process all your photo in batch. This can be surprising when you work with more than one program simultanously. Also this is important because when you are renaming some t
ACDSee Photo Manager (Score:1)
I'm doing something like this (Score:5, Interesting)
You can check out the code here if you want:
http://code.google.com/p/mediabrowser/ [google.com]
The project is written in C++ with Gtkmm, you'll have to compile it yourself since I haven't built any packages or anything.
Hope that helps.
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Anyway, in my copious free time, I'm going to set up Gallery2 on some hosting space, and wrangle some Perl to automatically tag uploaded photos in G2 based
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Basically, at the moment you can open up a directory full of images, and go through and add titles, tags, and watermarks - then put it all in a MySQL database. You can search tags in the database to look at your pictures. I also have a PHP script that will allow you to view the database on the web.
If a lot of people start requesting im
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If I were to move a dozen photos from one dir to another using explorer the descript.ion file in the other directory has none of the info about the files I just put there.
All that info is in the
descript.ion files suck unless
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I find that ACDSee's move/copy functions are better than Explorer's anyway; they have superior "file by this name already exists" handling. If there were a dupe-finder (like dff.sourceforge) that could reconcile different descript.ion tags associated with identical files, I'd be in heaven.
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What are you doing that will be different/better than Digikam, KPhotoAlbum, F-Spot, etc.? There are some very mature F/LOSS applications in this space, so I'm curious as to why you're starting from scratch. Not that there's anything wrong with writing a new app just for the fun of it.
Aside: Interestingly, this is an area where I think the F/LOSS offerings are substantially *better* than the commercial offerings on Windows and Mac. I'm not sure why that is, but it is. I suspect there probably are comme
Re:I'm doing something like this (Score:4, Interesting)
The motivation at first started out being that I just wanted to learn Gtk and play with ImageMagick a bit. Since I've been hacking on it for a few days, I have some ideas that I think will make my application a different alternative. For one, I want to support video and audio as well as images. Pretty much every phone and digital camera now days takes short video clips at least, and I think they should be integrated in with photos nicely in an album. Some of my other ideas are a bit more experimental.
As I was saying to a couple of people on IRC last night, in the end maybe some people will find the software useful, but it's probably going to become a sort of dumping grounds for me to play around with a lot of ideas I have for various image algorithms, and will eventually become completely incomprehencible to anyone below the rank of Advanced God.
If anyone is interested, a couple of the ideas I've had are:
Doing some facial recognition and learning algorithms so that the program will start to associate name tags with people in the photos, and automatically tag new photos with the people it sees in the photo.
Draw a picture that resembles the photo you are looking for, and search the database for it.
Using texture synthesis to clean up images.
Working on creating a UI with OpenGL.
those are just some of the potential ideas I have floating about in my head, if anyone is interested in lending a hand on coding on it send me an email.
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For one, I want to support video and audio as well as images. Pretty much every phone and digital camera now days takes short video clips at least, and I think they should be integrated in with photos nicely in an album.
KPhotoAlbum does that already, BTW.
foobar (Score:2, Funny)
Hmm. (Score:4, Informative)
Why, yes, and they're described in section 4.6 of the EXIF specification [exif.org].
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Informative)
As far as convenient ID3 type info that you can do something with; no.
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Not to mention that ImageDescription and UserComments can be of arbitrary length, which means you could pack some formatted data in there if you like.
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at least flickr gets them off of your drive (Score:2)
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I personally trust a company I'm paying to do a service for me... more than I trust myself. I originally started using Flickr because you get unlimited space for only $25 a month... and they will keep the photos forever. My computers are in a constant state of flux... I'm always trying new software or buying new hardware or whatever. I'm more worried about me accidentally deleting years worth of pictures than I am of Flickr erasing them.
But what's stopping you from doing bot
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The image files are important sure, but those are easy to back up and store like anything else, it's not the problem here. The problem is the organization, the tags, the settings, the galleries, those are important *too*, and there doe
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I love Flickr, don't get me wrong, I have a Pro account. a) it's $25 a year, and b) companies that have active incoming subscriptions have been known to go under, too.
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I guess that it's such a good deal my brain couldn't deal with it and _forced_ me to type "month" because that's the only way it made sense
Friedmud
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It's just $25 for a year... with 2GB a month of upload and unlimited storage space. If you are taking more than 2GB of pictures a month then you have special needs... and probably should consider buying your own server and loading it up with a bunch of RAID.
I've been paying for Flickr for a little while now... and have been _very_ satisfied. $25 a month to store my photos forever is a steal.
Friedmud
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You pay $25 per _year_ and get 2GB per _month_.
Friedmud
Request the features in Picasa (Score:2)
And thus, he said "iPhoto?" (Score:3, Insightful)
I use iPhoto and besides albums I can assign keywords to the pictures making it easy to search by keyword. If iPhoto is not enough then Aperature is supposed to provide even more so I assume it would have better organizational stuff too.
Of course, both require a Mac.
But I love iPhoto. All my photos have names, ratings, and a set a keywords with everything from file type to portrait/landscape, to camera model and lens (I, of course, had to set all these).
Aperture or Lightroom (Score:3, Informative)
But since you mentioned Picassa, I'll assume you are using Windows. You may want to look at Lightroom, you can organize photos and attach keywords which you can then search on. Lightroom will generate XMP files alongside images, which hold all your metadata (Aperture can do the same). Lightroom also stores these keywords inside a local database, making search very fast.
I'd second Lightroom (Score:2)
Make mine multi-user. And hierarchical. (Score:3, Interesting)
Big bonus for Shoebox, though, is the hierarchical tags -- I can't believe how far we've gone with all sorts of folksonomy tagging systems, but virtually nobody's using a hierarchy of tags. Keeping these flat, especially if you want to start organizing and grouping by family, is just unusable after a 25-50 tags or so. With Shoebox's system, you can set things up like "John's Family" with John, his wife, and all kids as sub tags. Then, if, say, "Tim" (John's oldest son) marries "Jane", create "Tim's Family" as a sub to John's family, or even as a sub to Tim, and you can use aliases to have Tim show up in both places. It's hard to explain without pictures, but trust me, it's really very flexible.
Anyway, the downsides:
* Again, a little buggy / flaky
* Proprietary: Can't export the data, though you can export the tag hierarchy (just not the associations between tags and the photos, at least not that I've found)
* Single-user: It's licensed for a single userid on a single CPU, so my wife can't even access it on the same box, let alone me or her on any other box in the house.
If we could get the organizational abilities of Shoebox (or a similar hierarchical tag system) in a client-server model, running on a linux server with clients on windows, mac, or whatever, then I think I'd have a personal winner. Bonus points if it speaks DPAP so iPhoto can read the libraries (to make printing, editing, etc., easier). Oh, and it'd have to have an easy way to store/track multiple versions of a photo, for when you crop, clean out redeye, etc.
I'm "this close" to starting to hack something together myself, but simply have no time with all the other unfinished projects in my life (not to mention my son). At least I should write up a more careful specifications document and post it on a blog somewhere, for someone who actually has time to start hacking at. Really, the back-end DB stuff is trivial, you just need a decent front end. And a web interface just wouldn't be all that usable for huge collections, either. (otherwise, I'd recommend giving Zoph [nother.net] a look, as it's got a lot of the DB stuff but it's 100% web based).
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Any pointers greatly appreciated.
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Do you mean like multiple pre-populated tag hierarchies that you can use in your favorite application? I know that Shoebox has some you can download [kavasoft.com] (replace the "shoebox://" with "http://" and you can get the xml files), both created by kavasoft and some created by users. They're a little oddly structured at first, but can be figured out pretty easil
IMatch (Score:1, Informative)
It has the possibility of multiple categories assignment and the categories can be organized in hierarchical mode. You can even assign keywords. Categories and keywords (with all the file metadata) can be used for searching images, for example you can do the search you cite but you can put even restrinction on file size, resolution and others attribute.
It has two ways of decoupling the db data from the program : the first is using IPTC (it can export ca
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It also has a "find by image content" and tons more features.
The programmer is very active on the user forums.
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DigiKam (Score:5, Informative)
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as for a windows version, that probably will be available with kde4 - not for another year, though
anyway, it should be possible to start using it now (dualboot, separate machine, virtualization - depending on the situation), like importing data, finding best usage patterns, tagging and so on - and later possibly use native win version.
Vista? (Score:2)
Layne
My method, but not using software. (Score:1, Insightful)
My method is probably not for everyone, but it's just a simple way of storing them.
I have a directory structure as follows:
photos/2006/0101-nakedlinuxchix0rz/*.jpg
photos/2006/0428-steveballmertakingitupthebummy/*. jpg
so bascially: photos///*.files
It's not software, but I prefer it because it's not dependant on a software package, and with grep or start -> find it's rather easy to locate my photos.
Just a thought, it probably sucks but it wo
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(Although the tags would certianly be useful at times...)
My reasoning was this: How can I identify my photos in a way that is obvious to me,
and obvious even if I copy a few photos on to a CD to send someone else, or email someone else?
Use a folder/hierarchy system for the basics.
Remember that you have date and timestamps to help you sort.
Rename the files using your keywords. Consider using a 3 digit number at the start of the
file name (e.g. 001) if you have o
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This is the same with my music collection...
Once I have that I can easily do manually tagging, and if the tagging system fails, at least I have a sorting method that works.
On a funny note, this one time, at lan camp, this one dude, had a porn share, with a brilliantly (and rather disturbing) sorted porn archive... all neatly categorized by
IPTC metadata is what you want (Score:5, Informative)
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IPTC metadata (Score:4, Interesting)
That is so incredibly cool!
It sounds like what you really need is a basic IPTC editor. That way all the metadata you associate with the file stays with the file wherever it goes. If you're using a mac and have $300 you aren't terribly good friends with, you could buy Aperture. It has a really nice system for assigning IPTC fields in batches, and you can also set up hierarchies of IPTC keywords. (Think tags, but IPTC keywords have been in use a long time with the photo industry, and they call them IPTC keywords) Oh and Aperture does loads of other stuff. Its overkill if you don't shoot in RAW mode and do some post-processing. If you're talking about snapshots here, I would just find a simple tool for whatever you platform of choice is to let you edit IPTC headers. Get them all labeled first, then worry about management software in another year or so once you have finished all the labeling.
Oh and try not to take any pictures in the meantime. You'll only make more work for yourself. Say hi to the Granmas for me!
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It is quite powerful, and the author is very responsive.
http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml [sourceforge.net]
The argument for IPTC is simple: The data is stored in the image.
I'm working on some perl scripts to search IPTC data in images, and create directories of symlinks to the results. That way I could use a tag like Xmas, and then run a query based on the year in the datestamp and the tag Xmas, and end up with subdirs for each year and all the
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Use Adobe Photoshop Album (Score:2)
Currently have over 15,000 photos in there and performance doesn't seem to be an issue.
The only gripe I have is that it doesn't (yet) support RAW photos. Hopefully they'll change that in the next release.
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There are many (Score:1)
My method (Score:2)
But yeah EXIF tags have a comment field so why don't you just put a sequence of keywords in there (or whole sentences if you like) and then use a full-text search engine? I've had good luck with Swish++ [sourceforge.net] to search other kinds of documents (MP3 metadata, Word docs, PDFs, plain text, HTML
Exifdater console utility (Score:2)
Exifdater reads date EXIF data from a jpg file, and renames the file according to the pattern that you specify in the command parameters. It can incorporate the original filename in the new filename. You can then organize your photos according to date, simply using your filesystem. This way you are not locked into any database format
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My open, simple approach to the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote a couple of scripts for bulk-importing lots of files and started a windows GUI editor to encourage family to adopt it, but got distracted. I have just been doing everything with emacs in the meantime.
==
== Photo Description Tools
==
Digital photos are wonderful, but for all of their megapixels they lack the simple feature of prints -- you can't write on the back of them.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. When I take a picture of Uncle Harvey, the JPEG file is one million bytes in size. You would think that it wouldn't be difficult to add in the twelve extra bytes for the string "Uncle Harvey".
The problem is that everyone wants to do it differently. In what has become computing industry standard practice, each vendor wants to lock you into their private database for notes, and when the technology or business environment changes, you lose everything.
In the past year, I have shot many photos, and since I can't jot notes on the back, have forgotten many details about the subjects. I can't wait another few years for a winner to emerge before recording this information. I need to capture it now!
I keep my physical photos for 30-40 years, and want to keep my digital photos for just as long. If you believe that your current solution is going to survive that long, good for you. I don't, and this is my open way of saving the information in a way that will survive for many years and hopefully outlast the stupid vendor contests.
That data belongs to you! Don't let someone else lock it up!
These protocols were written to scratch this particular itch. The following are
my design goals:
- Let me capture BASIC information about the photos
- Store the master copy of the information in a separate file,
so that we never lose it if some vendor decides to strip
things from the picture file.
- Store the master copy in an open format so that I can write
tools against it or even just edit it with a text editor
and never be held hostage to a particular tool.
- Copy the info into the file multiple times in all the competing
protocols, so that it will be visible in whatever system
you happen to be using.
In order to make this happen, I have defined two specs that will
govern the tools I write. If it other people and projects want to
adopt them too, so much the better.
The first is the pixtag file format for picture descriptions. This is
simple enough to write by hand with notepad.exe or emacs (I am doing a
lot of this while building my tools), but structured enough for tools
to easily read and manage.
The second is a naming convention for files. You can use pixtag
regardless of what you name your image files, but if you plan on
keeping your pictures for decades, you better use something better
than the IMG_1234 that comes out of your camera. Plus, you better
plan on mixing those files with ones from other people, scans of
traditional prints, and so on.
PIXTAG DESCRIPTION FILE
There is some flexibility in how the master file is handled. In most
cases, I expect that there will be one file with all of the pictures a
person has, or one file per directory (what I do) However, some people
may want to partitioning files by year, or overachievers may even load
everything into a mysql database.
I suggest the pixtag file extension for the master files. So for a
single file it might look like:
loffredo.pixtag
For multiple years or directories it might look like
196x_loffredo.pixtag
KPhotoAlbum (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know what platform you're on, but if you're on a Unix system, I *highly* recommend KPhotoAlbum (previously called KimDaBa).
Some of its features:
If you're going to try KPA, I highly recommend getting an SVN version, or waiting a few weeks for the next release. It's a very significant upgrade over the last release and it's been in feature freeze for a while so it's very solid.
One of the things the question asked about was embedding the tags in the images, and if there was a standard way to do that. There is, it's called IPTC, and KPA supports loading tags from IPTC data. It doesn't support writing tags to IPTC, for two reasons:
Note also that there are some tools out there that only store the metadata in IPTC
What you asked for vs need - & the beauty of X (Score:2)
But for the INTENT you talked about - managing and searching for your photos - it's all wrong unless your system 100% caches it - which for YOUR purposes is a lot like no
Re:What you asked for vs need - & the beauty o (Score:2)
XML is probably a good enough solution for your purposes, which is why I posted this below one talking about how KPhotoAlbum is XML based. For a multiple simultaneous write situation, flat file XML is simply not enough and you'll need a DB (and with some indicies you'll get MUCH better search speed) - but you can always export backups to XML.
As I mentioned in the post you responded to, soon that will be XML-based or SQL-based. The SQL stuff works now, but it's still quite alpha.
Now you've gone and m
Re:What you asked for vs need - & the beauty o (Score:2)
Sure, but someone had mentioned they didn't want a SQL solution because they were concerned about being able to use it much longer.
>>>I think we (using the word in its most general sense) are.
I meant it in a less general sense.
photolibrary (Score:5, Informative)
So have a look at http://photolibrary.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] (or http://sourceforge.net/projects/photolibrary [sourceforge.net])
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link (Score:2, Informative)
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/09/photo
iMatch from photools.com (Score:1)
http://photools.com/ [photools.com]
IMatch is exactly what you're looking for. It can import/export IPTC data, EXIF data, and there's a scripting language that you could use to import/export your own database. Lots of tagging options (I have my family tree, literally as a tree of tags, locations, events,
I'm making this brief since I'm busy, but you
IPTC keywords in Picasa (Score:2)
The IPTC keywords are standard metadata attached to the photo, other software can read them - Flickr will read IPTC keywords in uploaded photos and turn them into tags.
iViewMedia Pro (Score:1)
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/ [iview-multimedia.com]
ed
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The interface is not iPhoto-simple, but is very flexible and rewards a bit of investment and experimentation. You can use IPTC tags, plus add your own custom tags. Metadata is exportable as XML. It can (optionally) be embedded within image files (for image formats that permit embedded metainformation).
One real strength that may be useful is that you can use all the cataloging (including thumbnails) even if you don't have a
ThumbsPlus is pretty powerful (Score:1)
As TP asks how you want your database created (proprietory or MSAccess compatible), you can run your own querys outside of TP if you wish. Lots of metadata tagging features too.
It's not that expensive ($49 for Std 1 user license; $89 for Pro, which has more database functionality), and higher licenses allow for multiple concurrent users.
htt [cerious.com]
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I love it, but confess that I'm going to stick with it for a low overhead viewer/slideshow, and move my serious management to IviewMediaPro.
Gallery2 (Score:1)
Exifer for Windows (Score:1)
http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer
Symlinks could be helpful (Score:2)
Something similar could work for your p
I just wrote my own AJAX Online Photo Storage (Score:1)
I've setup a demo with some of my pics for you guys to check out:
http://ima [farleyfamily.net]
Kphotoalbum (Score:2)
just use properly named directories (Score:1)
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I don't want to use a piece of software to do this, so I just create directories.
The first part of the directory's name is the date: 20061121
The second part of the directory's name is the person who took the picture (some of the pictures that I have were taken by someone else): john
The third part of the directory's name is a keyword of the event: grandma-birthday.
And an example of a full name is: 20061121.john.grandma-birthday
I use dots for seperators, but
How about the aptly-named "Photo Organizer"? (Score:1)
In my case -- I needed remote network access, but I also wanted to be in full control of my data. I primarily wanted a full-on repository to hold *everything*, with configurable views for different people (and/or the general public). I didn't want to have to manually generate web galleries and manage all of that independently.
After some casting about, I ended up settling on Photo Organizer. [shaftnet.org] It's fully database-driven (PostgreSQL) and thus scales quite well
My conclusion too (Score:2)
The hitch ? No program can handle them properly: the programs that can put the keywords in the EXIF are bugged, crash often (taking the entire Windows Explorer with them, requiring a reboot in XP), have shitty UIR, overwrite other EXIF fields, drop color profiles or recompress the JPEG da
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Yet another reason to work in RAW. "To JPEG" is the last step in my workflow.
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All sorts of useless stuff was stored in there including file associations (ie: which program to use to read the file).
I believe that the MAC file system uses forks, which have similar functionality.
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Mac resource forks are somewhat similar, but I think the Mac did it first.