- How to deactivate metadata extraction in Alfresco

This a simple tip for deactivating metadata extractors in Alfresco 4 and 5 (from Alfresco 4.1.4 and above) 

• In a bulk filesystem import, you can lose performance in data injection due metadata extracters.
• When you have a huge repository with millions of documents, and you want to apply indexation policies to prevent a non-controlled indices growth.

In alfresco-global.properties just type (and then restart the service):

# pdfs
extracter.PDFBox.enabled=false
# office types
extracter.Office.doc.enabled=false
extracter.Office.xls.enabled=false 
extracter.Office.ppt.enabled=false
# images (no exif aspect)
extracter.TikaAuto.enabled=false
# docx,xlsx,pptx
extracter.Poi.enabled=false

You can check that data is not being extracted, activating the logger in custom-log4j.properties (repository):

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.repo.content.metadata.MetadataExtracterRegistry=debug