Digital Home Thoughts: Can't Edit File Metadata on Vista? Here's a Fix

One of the improvements in Windows Vista is the system-wide search functionality; but the search functionality is only as good as the data it's searching. Tagging files is how you achieve great search results - but there's an interesting bug in Vista where sometimes, you can't edit the metadata. In the screenshot below, you can see there's no metadata for title, tags, etc. Yet when I tried to enter metadata values into the file, I couldn't - no amount of clicking or double-clicking would turn the appropriate field into write mode.



The solution? When you're on the Details tab, at the bottom of the window there's a link that says "Remove Properties and Personal Information". This is a "scrubbing" tool that Microsoft built into the operating system - clicking that brings up a Remove Properties window. From there you'll want to select "Remove the Following Properties from this file" and click Select All, then OK. In every instance that I've tried this, it's worked - allowing me to edit the metadata fields once again.