A
system and related techniques generate an interrogation request from an initiator device, such as a
client desktop
machine or other
machine, to a mobile or other media player, such as a
digital camera, MP3 player,
video camera or other device or hardware to enumerate the
media content contained in that device, along with associated properties. The collection of binary objects which
encode the content, such as digital photographs, encoded audio files, digitized video or other media, may include or have associated with them a set of corresponding object properties which help to define each object, such as by defining a
pixel color depth, audio codec or other property or attribute. According to embodiments of the invention, the initiator may communicate with the responding device using a media-aware protocol supporting an aggregate object property request, such that the initiator may identify one or all of the set of properties paired with all of the objects to be returned along with an enumeration of those objects. The initiator may then present, for example, a
list of song titles along with the corresponding artist, track length, codec, display skins or other attributes or properties to a user, for example to select, delete, copy or otherwise manipulate the underlying objects, which may in one regard be separately retrieved from their identifier and properties. Because properties may be retrieved in conjunction with, at the same time and using a unified retrieval scheme, the need to query each
object identifier one by one for associated properties is removed. The
throughput and responsiveness of object property retrieval is therefore significantly enhanced.