Summary tab missing from Properties

I am afraid erpmanila3w is mistaken.  the Details tab under Win7 is not a suitable replacement for the Summary tab available under Windows XP.

Suppose I open a video folder and in it I have an mp4 file, an avi file and an flv file.  If I right-click on the mp4 file and click on Properties > Details tab, I will find that Title, Subtitle,  Rating, Tags, Comments, and Length are listed.  All of these except Length are editable.  Many other properties are listed and editable.  If I click on the avi file, I find Title, Subtitle, Rating, and Length are listed, but no Properties for this file type are editable.  For the flv file, I find Name (not Title) and Type are listed, but no Properties are editable for this file type either.

If I create extra columns in my video file for Length, Comments, Rating, and Summary, I will be able to edit in a Comment and a Rating for the mp4 file but not the other two.  I will be able to see the Length of the mp4 and the avi file but not the flv.  The column heading "Summary" has nothing to do with the old Summary tab under XP where I could right-click on the file > Properties > Summary tab.

To say that this is a "work in progress" in an understatement.  Consider the Rating for my avi file.  It appears as a column and in the Properties > Details tab, but cannot be filled in!  What is the point of that?

My guess is that Win7 intends to begin to fill in the gaps for various file types, listing more Properties (also called metadata) and making more of them editable.  They should do so quickly and not allow the proliferation of third party metadata editors that will not interface correctly with Windows Explorer.  When I click on Rating (at the head of the column), I expect to see my videos rated in order.  If I click again, I expect to see them rated in reverse (highest to lowest).  I expect tags to be findable under the Explorer search utility.

In the meantime, can they not give us back the power and ease of use they took away from XP?  Consider an example:  Under Xp, I could easily add several "canned" headings (Properties) that I wanted in a video folder.  The property was not bound to the file type; it was bound to the folder in which the extra columns were created.  XP gave me about a dozen Column Headings that were very generic and had nothing to do with a specific file type; for example:  “Comments”, “Subject”, “Category”, or “Title”.  If I wanted to give a video a rating of 1 to 16, I could enter a Comment of “ 3” (the space in front of the 3 makes it work alphabetically).  If I now click on the Comments column heading, all my videos will be listed in order of their rating!  If I click again, they will be listed highest ranked first.

This worked wonderfully for flv files under XP, and for any other file type that might appear in a video folder.  In order to do grouping and sorting correctly, I MUST be able to enter certain data for ANY file type under any columns (Properties) that I declare to be generic across all file types.  Let us not confuse such a generic column heading with the idea of editable and uneditable metadata for a particular type of file.  The latter is a much harder project that M.S. can take more time to finish.

I can no longer display the column headings I created under XP, let alone sort on them.  If you agree with me that this is nonsense and you are tired of waiting for M.S. to fix the problem, please note that Dena B has provided a link labeled "feedback here" just five entries before this one in this very thread.  Along with your feedback, be sure to refer them to this thread and my name.

In short, I request an answer to one of two questions:  Why did M.S. take away the power and ease of use that we had under XP?  Or else, can someone please show me the simple way to accomplish what I was doing to all of my folders using Windows XP?

Thanks for your patience, I know this is a lot of words, but as Mozart said about his music, "Which notes would you leave out?"

You have got to be kidding me?  Why would Microsoft "take away" features that have been part of Windows for decades and require 3rd party software to compensate?

This is ridiculous and unacceptable!!!

In order to do grouping and sorting correctly, I MUST be able to enter certain data for ANY file type under any columns (Properties) that I declare to be generic across all file types.  Let us not confuse such a generic column heading with the idea of editable and uneditable metadata for a particular type of file. 

The crucial question is, where would such data be stored?  It can't be stored in the file itself, because there is no universal way of doing this. Some file types, like text files, have no place to put such data at all.  XP solved this by keeping the data in a central repository, separate from the file the metadata described. In Vista and later, Microsoft moved away from this because of the problem of metadata getting lost when files were e-mailed or moved around, which had become a much more common scenario. Instead, Vista committed to only handling metadata stored within a particular file format, with the drawback of losing universal metadata support.

My FOSS solution at http://filemeta.codeplex.com allows you to see and edit metadata for any file type, with two limitations. Firstly, although the metadata is stored with the file, and not in a central repository, and so is not lost when the file is moved around within NTFS, the metadata is lost when the file is e-mailed or moved to a different file system. This is very problem that Vista shied away from - I demand of my users that they be aware of it, which I don't think the guys at Microsoft could. Secondly, my solution does not allow the user to interfere where Windows already has specific support for a file format. The good news is that it is hard to mess anything up. The bad news is that where the Windows support is not very good, it doesn't get better. For MP3 files, for instance, you can edit comments etc without a problem. For MP 4 or AVI files, Windows does have format-specific support, but as you observe, it does not allow you to write comments. FLV files are not supported by Windows out-of-the-box, and so it is possible to turn on metadata support for these files, including writable comments etc, using my solution. To do the same for MP4 and AVI files, it is necessary to remove the Windows support first.  This requires a manual registry hack.  I could of course modify my solution to do this for e user, but I am very reluctant to do so, because I can't see how to guarantee to get back reliably to the starting point of an untouched Windows system in every scenario.

For the knowledgeable, or just brave, the registry entry that configures the Windows support for MP4, for instance, is:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PropertySystem\PropertyHandlers.mp4]

@="{f81b1b56-7613-4ee4-bc05-1fab5de5c07e}"

The required steps to turn on File Meta support for MP4 are:

1. find this key and delete it
2. after deleting the key, open the File Association Manager in File Meta to turn on the File Meta Property Handler for MP4
3. kill all instances of Explorer.exe and restart it, to force Explorer to read the new registry settings

The steps for any other file type are similar: there is a key in \PropertySystem\PropertyHandlers\ for each handled extension.  This has to be done per extension because Vista moved away from the 'one size fits all extensions' approach of XP.

Anybody doing this should be aware that metadata updates will no longer be written to the file itself. I would also recommend maintaining a line of retreat by exporting the targeted registry entries before deletion.

I see that, but I can't seem to find a place to enter that information for a pdf file anywhere.  In XP, you could right click on a pdf file, go to properties, get the summary tab and add info there.  Now, I can add the summary column in, but I can't add any information to it even if I open the pdf and go to properties.  Thanks!