There are situations where I need to embed a photo or have photos alongside my text (*.txt, *.md) files… think of a project where you say “Working on a cabinet that has a broken hinge.” It would be nice to have a picture of the broken hinge right there… without having to open Photos, search, etc. Heck, what do you even search for, I cannot effectively search for that… sure, there is OCR which helps some… but it doesn’t let me set my own description, it doesn’t necessarily get the 5 Ws… (who, what, where, when, why).

So… I set out to fix that.

Now, all of the pictures in my notes have an associated “metadata” file alongside it. It’s the same file name, but with the extension of .md instead of .jpg.

All of the metadata files embed the image and have a description of the image.

I can now embed the metadata file, instead of the image, and I can see the image and the description. Furthermore, the metadata file shows up in my searches based on the description.

This is one of those things that is probably helpful for a total of one person (that person being me), but this is great. I’m going to expand this to other things:

  • metadata about a project
  • metadata about a PDF
  • etc.

I don’t know why, but this brings me joy.