Practical Example

Metadata is very important as it can help you sort through and organize your files in a DAM (digital asset management) system. With full metadata, you can search by any term, like creation date or author. Let’s take a look at an example of metadata for a video uploaded to a DAM (Lochner, 2018^[1]).

As you can see, the metadata for this video has been prefilled with all of the necessary information. Using this metadata, we know the length of the video, the framerate, etc. Now, we can use that information to search our database if we are looking for this file, regardless of how the file is named. Handy, right? We are also able to fill in part of the metadata (like the title, comments, tags) to give our file more ways to be sorted and searched. For example, we can tag this video as “cooking” and then when we require cooking videos, we can just search by that tag, instead of digging through all of the files.