Oh, it's all coming back to me now.... I remember when that "feature" was introduced. I thought, "Now there's something that's guaranteed to produce confusion!" I vowed never to go near it.

I can see why ZigZag might benefit from having a "long description" and a "short description" for a folder. But the way it was implemented produces the weirdness that we've just encountered - fields that ordinarily show the same entered text in every other skin, but that can contain a mismatch in this one.

It probably should have been implemented as a customUI, available only for folder AO's, rather than pressing well-understood fields in the regular UI into doing double duty. And it should have been called something obviously different, like longdescrip.

On a related subject, why is descrip the only thing that's still stored in meta.properties, rather than in .info?

I agree.


It shoud be phased-out in favor of .info. We also use meta.properties to keep track of image ordering

It can be your "rainy day" project - untangle it, but also make sure that existing projects are automatically converted.

I haven't checked them all, but is any other skin using that feature?

I just did the check - among the current skins, ZigZag is alone. It's a safe bet that none of the legacy skins is using it, either.

Yes, meta.properties is a bit of a relic.

But I wouldn't mess with comments.properties. I suspect there are a lot of users who access that file directly, in a text editor, or who actually generate that file from within another image-organizing app. They'd be very unhappy if they had to start dealing with XML files.