Since the dawn of the Mac, or close to it, anyway, you have been able to Get Info on a file, and enter a comment. I’ve found that pretty handy over the years, especially when a folder of files forms kind of a mini-database, and displaying the Comments column in Finder list view provides an additional field for arbitrary data.

Unfortunately, they’ve always been pretty fragile, because, historically, they were not stored in the file itself, but in a database on the system. So if you copy the file elsewhere, there’s a decent risk that you’d lose the comment that went with it, depending on how you did it.

If you add a comment to a file that is synchronized, with, say, Dropbox, and then sign into Dropbox on another computer and let it load up your files, you might find your comment missing. This is very sad. Sometimes they just go missing on their own. That’s even sadder.

Fortunately, macOS now does at least now store the comment in the file metadata, so all is not lost. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go the extra mile of showing you the comment directly from the metadata.

So, I wrote an AppleScript utility to make the comments display again. It goes and fetches the comment, and puts it back into the Get Info box where it belongs. You just drag whatever files and folders need their Finder comments restored onto the script.

We don’t have comments (har) turned on over here for spam reasons, so if you have any questions, you can shoot them to me at [email protected].

download it here: Restore Finder Comments

(Image by Jeff Djevdet, courtesy Flickr Creative Commons.)