Library Intelligencer

Metadata, often referred to as “data about data,” provides interesting information that supplements the
primary content of digital documents. Metadata has become a powerful tool to organize and search
through the growing libraries of image, audio and video content that users are producing and
consuming. This is especially important in the area of digital photography where, despite the increased
quality and quantity of sensor elements, it is not currently practical to organize and query images
based only on the millions of image pixels. Instead, it is best to use metadata properties that describe
what the photo represents and where, when and how the image was taken.
Metadata is now critical in workflows ranging from consumer sharing experiences to professional-level
asset management. That said, there are several complications which result from structural hierarchies
required to store metadata within images:
Digital images are stored in a variety of common file formats such as TIFF, JPEG and PSD as well as
proprietary formats such as RAW. Each file format has unique rules regarding how metadata formats
must be stored within the file.