Modifying value of "Rating" column within Explorer for arbitrary file types

Basically, I have a large body of assorted media (text, images, flash files, archives, folders, etc...) and I'm attempting to organize it.

Windows Explorer has a rating column, but there seems to be no way to modify the rating of the files short of opening them in their type-specific software (e.g. Media player, or Photo viewer). However, this does not work when the file is of an unsupported type (.rar, .swf ...), or a directory.

I'd be more than willing to consider a file-manager replacement (I've alreadly looked at quite a few, Directory Opus, Total Commander, etc...), or even a solution that stores the rating metadata in a hidden file in each folder, or a separate database. The one real critical requirement is the ability to sort by rating, and being filetype-agnostic.

Basically, is there any way to categorize a large collection of assorted files by rating that will work with any file type, including directories?

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Ideally, there would be an easy way to add arbitrary columns to windows explorer, and edit them directly. However, there seems to be no way to do this. The rating column is the next best thing.

For what it's worth, at this point I've more or less given up on finding something that can do what I'm looking for as described in the question. I'm now mostly using a special-purpose python webapp to manage a lot of my media content (it's a great way to learn web-programming).

Solution 1:

I made a really tiny program in AutoHotKey that does what you want.
It displays files and folders and there is a rating column that you can click to set a rating between 0 and 5. It displays '--' if the file has not been rated yet. You can click on the column headers to sort. Double click on a folder to go into it or a file to open it.

The data is stored in a .ini file in the same directory as the program.

You can download the binary here: rater.exe (mirror)
And the source (in AutoHotKey language): rater.ahk (mirror)

Solution 2:

The rating column in Windows shows the rating metadata found in media files; Windows does not maintain this data itself. You can edit it by right clicking the file, choosing "Properties", and then selecting the "Details" tab.

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In the case of non media files (rar, swf), there is no rating metadata, so there's no way for Windows to show or allow you to edit this information so you will definitely need some other software to do this for you.