Metadata

Metadata is the information about a file - who made it, what it shows, when it was captured, and who may use it - stored with the file so software can search, sort and control it. It is the catalogue card attached to every asset. Some of it is written by the camera or the software automatically; some of it is added by people or suggested by auto-tagging. Without it a library is a pile of filenames, and finding anything depends on someone remembering where they put it.

It is the feature that separates a DAM from cloud storage: search, filtering, rights tracking, expiry and automation all run on metadata, not on folder names. It is also what makes a library survive its own growth - at a few hundred files you can browse, at a hundred thousand you can only query. And because standards-based metadata travels inside the file, the work your team puts into describing assets stays yours rather than becoming a vendor's database.

Embedded metadata lives inside the file itself, in standard blocks like IPTC, XMP and EXIF, and travels with it wherever it goes. Database metadata lives in the DAM and can hold anything the system supports, including custom fields, collections and relationships that no file format has a slot for. Most tools use both. The question that matters at exit is whether the DAM writes its metadata back into the files on export, or whether leaving means leaving your descriptions behind.

Three standards that cover different jobs. EXIF is written by the camera - exposure, lens, timestamp, sometimes GPS coordinates. IPTC is the editorial layer - creator, caption, copyright, credit - a fixed set of fields the publishing world agreed on. XMP is Adobe's extensible framework, which can carry the standard fields plus custom ones a specific workflow defines. A single file commonly carries all three at once, and a serious DAM reads and writes all three rather than picking one and discarding the rest.

That depends entirely on where the tool keeps it. Metadata embedded in the file, in IPTC or XMP, moves with the file into the next system and needs no cooperation from the vendor you are leaving. Metadata that exists only in the vendor's database moves only as far as their export lets it - which is often a CSV you then have to remap by hand. Ask, before you buy, whether the tool writes metadata back into the files, and export a handful to check that it actually does.