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User profile for user: neilfromwigan
neilfromwigan Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Synology NAS / apple tags

I'm hoping to upload a lot of local history research files - mainly pdf, spreadsheet and image from my Mac to a Synology NAS, my previous WD MyCloud being obsolete. Whenever I have uploaded files to USB's or external drives tag data has been preserved. Early attempts to upload to the NAS and download from the NAS suggest that this information is lost in the upload. As the tags are essential for grouping and organising the files it would be great if this data could be preserved with the file. Ive had no joy in finding a solution to this through internet trawls of this and the Synology site. Can anyone confirm whether there is a way of retaining this 'metadata' ?

Posted on Oct 10, 2022 2:24 PM

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User profile for user: VikingOSX
VikingOSX
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
116,003 points

Oct 10, 2022 3:07 PM in response to neilfromwigan

Only the Finder can detect and present tag information on a file. I just mounted an SMB share from my Synology DiskStation and shoved a PDF onto it with two tags assigned. The tags remained on the PDF once copied to the Synology share and also when copied/moved back to macOS Big Sur 11.7. The same result was observed when the Synology mount was an AFP share.


Tags are extended attributes on the document and any copy operation between macOS and the Synology share should use the Finder drag and drop, or if from the Terminal, either of these to preserve the extended attributes on the file:


cp -p file_with_tags.pdf /Volumes/share/destfolder
ditto file_with_tags.pdf /Volumes/share/destfolder/file_with_tags.pdf


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User profile for user: neilfromwigan
neilfromwigan Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Oct 11, 2022 7:06 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for the advice - it does explain what I have found to a degree - I had not realized that the tags aren’t visible on iOS - iPhone & iPad - I will need to add key words to the file names as they are uploaded to the NAS especially as other users are on different operating systems - could you explain the significance of the scripts that you added ? Thanks again


Neil

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User profile for user: VikingOSX
VikingOSX
Community+ 2024
User level: Level 10
116,003 points

Oct 11, 2022 7:51 AM in response to neilfromwigan

In the macOS Terminal command line, the cp and ditto commands (as shown) preserve the file extended attributes (including tags) when using those commands to copy onto the mounted Synology share.


By the way, Finder comments are an extended attribute and are actually preserved when one opens the file on Windows 10/11, but tags are uniquely seen by Apple's Finder, which does not exist on iOS/iPadOS. When sharing files across operating systems, I suggest you do not use spaces in the filenames, but rather underscores instead.

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Synology NAS / apple tags

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