winshell
Tim Golden <mail@timgolden.me.uk>
The Windows Shell offers a slightly complicated facility to embed its own metadata (or any other information) inside a file. This concept is called Structured Storage and it's the basis for the [Properties] tab available via Explorer. This can include data from within the file's own structure (eg the ID3 tags from an MP3 file) but also data held separately, including arbitrary attributes, which are held via structured storage.
The module currently implements the simplest of wrappers, querying a file for any structured storage and retrieving any which is held under the user-defined properties layout. (Structured storage can hold data of several categories). Only specific, commonly-queried fields are accessed, and they are returned as a Python dictionary.
- Structured Storage
Structured storage on MSDN
- More general-purpose implementation
- Allow writing of structured storage