By default, Cumulus stores metadata in catalogs, which are separate from assets. This offers a number of advantages over systems that force you to store metadata inside assets, but sometimes storing metadata inside assets is important. Fortunately, Cumulus enables you to do both!

This Term of the Month explains what metadata write-back is, when it makes sense, and why it’s so important that Cumulus offers write-backs as option, not a requirement.

A hybrid approach to metadata storage

Operating systems store metadata inside asset files. This is how a file’s name, size, modification date and more “travel” with that file between computers. This is also how all that information comes into Cumulus in the first place. When you first think about it, internal storage of metadata sounds great—everything lives right inside the asset, no matter where that asset goes.

But there are important reasons why internal metadata storage isn’t a good option, particularly when it’s your only option:

• Metadata loss – If you lose or damage a file, you also lose all the file’s metadata. Sure, you might have file backups, but do you really want to keep new copies of a 200MB Photoshop file each time you update some tiny bit of metadata?
• Metadata searching of offline files – Unless your files are online, you won’t be able to search their metadata. This means all those years of CD/DVD archives need to also be stored on hard drives accessible to the DAM system. Otherwise, you can’t search their contents.
• Metadata management – When you have two (or more) copies of a file, how do you manage the metadata contents? You might make a metadata update to one copy, but if you’ve got 1,000 other copies in circulation, that doesn’t do you much good, because they’ll all have obsolete metadata—and worse—no indication the metadata they contain is obsolete.
• Metadata flexibility – File are very limited as to the types of metadata they can contain, and most file formats don’t support embedded custom metadata at all. Example: You can easily add IPTC or XMP metadata standard information to a JPEG image, but you can’t do the same with a PowerPoint presentation. Further, Cumulus supports metadata types as complex and powerful as audio annotations, graphical commenting regions and hierarchical categories. But no file formats support the embedding if information like that.

The metadata catalogs Cumulus is based upon solve all of these issues, and more. But they don’t solve one important concern: Copyright notices and other important usage restrictions that travel with your files, no matter where those files go.

To address this, Cumulus uses metadata write-backs, through which Cumulus embeds into your assets   metadata you have added or edited inside Cumulus. The process is transparent to the user, so it’s something an organization can rely upon to be handled consistently.

In practice, it’s simple: Users edit metadata as usual, but when they save the asset record, Cumulus writes metadata inside the asset itself. Then, wherever the asset goes, so goes the embedded metadata.

To further increase the benefits you can get from metadata write-backs, Cumulus also enables you to map metadata between fields. This means you can take advantage of popular metadata standards to store and transfer information they’re not specifically intended for.

To learn more about how Cumulus can write-back metadata into assets, don’t miss the Cumulus Power Tip, Add License Info (and More) to Every Photo You Distribute.