267369 - When downloading a file or saving a web page, put source URL into "Notes" (Gnome) or "Summary" (Windows) of the saved files.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Alek Kowalczyk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040917 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040917 Firefox/0.9.3

Some OSes (at least Windows and Gnome) have a factility to put some specific
properties or text notes on each file (for example: "Notes" tab in Nautilus or
"Summery" tab in Explorer). 

It would be very usable to have there a reference to the url the file was
downloaded from. "Save link target..." and "Save Page As..." commands should put
such an URL into properties/notes of the downloaded file(s). It would save some
time when trying to find the document on the web again, or just when referencing
to the URL in some sience article.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Save any html page, PDF document, etc... anywhere, using Firefox
2. Open Nautilus, Explorer or other file manager.
3. Go into "Notes"(Gnome), "Summary"(Explorer) or equivalent facility

Actual Results:  
Nothing.

Expected Results:  
The link to the document on the web should appear.

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

Related is Bug 125729 (put comment in the file itself). 

I see you mean to put it for example in the "Summary Properties" stream with
NTFS5 on Win NT5.x (2K, XP, 2K3). See
http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=15900 and
http://patriot.net/~carvdawg/docs/dark_side.html Figure 2. This doesn't work for
filesystems like FAT32 or with Win9x/NT4.

Comment 2

[ckozus]

Something as simple as adding the URL in a html comment at the beginning of the
file should be enough. IE does it that way.

Comment 3

[a_geek]

Just wanted to report this, too ;-)

And, please _DON'T_ alter the file downloaded by adding some **** to it. Most
files I download are binary files (compressed archives of program source or
binary code, at least) and adding stuff to them make them unusable and also
breaks their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksums.

This data belongs into the download history of the browser, not into the file
downloaded (but a facility to save that download history in a plain
text/HTML/XML-file would be great, as well as a search facility).

Experienced with Mozilla Suite on Linux, so please change the
product accordingly, thanks.

Comment 4

[OstGote!]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Something as simple as adding the URL in a html comment at the beginning of the
> file should be enough. IE does it that way.

That is Bug 125729! This bug is about to use meta data and not the original file
itself.

Comment 5

[Pascal Bourguignon]

I would like to see this feature happen too.

On MacOSX, Finder Comments can be accessed with the xattr(1) command, or the associated library functions: getxattr(2), listxattr(2), removexattr(2) and setxattr(2).

$ xattr -p -l com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment ~/Downloads/TUE.pdf 
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment:
00000000  62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 5F 10 3C 4F 72 69 67 69  |bplist00_.<Origi|
00000010  6E 3A 20 68 74 74 70 3A 2F 2F 77 77 77 2E 75 70  |n: http://www.up|
00000020  72 2E 66 72 2F 77 70 2D 63 6F 6E 74 65 6E 74 2F  |r.fr/wp-content/|
00000030  75 70 6C 6F 61 64 73 2F 32 30 31 32 2F 30 32 2F  |uploads/2012/02/|
00000040  54 55 45 2E 70 64 66 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01  |TUE.pdf.........|
00000050  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 47                          |.......G|
00000068

Comment 6

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Marking as P5. This is desirable but unlikely to be addressed soon.

Comment 8

[Denis Müller [:Webworkr]]

See also bug 1892088 (Fenix feature request).