21 September 2007 @ 10:37iTunes Flaw of Multi-Editing Video Info

iTunes doesn’t allow editing of the information for multiple video files.

But it does, sort of.

multi_item1.gifYou know the drill. You have several songs for which you want to edit some information. You shift-click them, press command+I, and are presented with the Multiple Item Information dialog box. Here you can edit a field that will be that same across all the selected songs. This is often very convenient for changing a year or an album name.

movie_info.gifSo, what happens when you have movies for which you want to “multi-edit”? You are presented with the same dialog as you are when you edit music info. You will notice that when you singly edit movie information, there is a Name field, but once you try to edit multiples, that field is gone. Worse is the fact that this “Multiple Item Information” dialog is aimed solely at music and takes no consideration for other media formats. Many aspects of video are not even addressed by iTunes, such as Description, Network, Copyright, Encoding Tool, Rating, Rating Annotation, Content Advisory, and Cast and Crew Listing.

My first thought to remedy this problem was to change the Video Kind to TV Show instead of Movie. That would make sense, right? TV Shows have episodes and seasons — not unlike music has song titles and albums. Unfortunately, after making this change, the information dialog box remains the same “Multiple Item Information” dialog. I wish I could add information to my videos such as Director, Writer, maybe even Language and Country.

I know that there are third-party utilities to do metadata editing, and I’m not trying to devalue the work their developers have put into them. Apple just needs to address the flaws in iTunes and continue to make it better. Apple, please fix this bug in iTunes that won’t allow us to correctly edit the information of multiple video files.

Update: This issue has been greatly improved in iTunes v8.

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by | 2 comments | Tags: ,
Posted in apple, itunes, video | Link to this

Comments:

  1. JohnQ | 24 Sep 2007 @ 22:15 #

    Hear Hear!

    If they really want to start marketing video as a suitable Ipod Medium, then they really should get on the ball on this one. Where can we send them suggestions?

  2. Jon | 25 Sep 2007 @ 0:08 #

    You should be able to submit a comment here:
    http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

    I submitted a comment, but I didn’t indicate it as a bug, rather a “design/interface” issue.

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