As your media library continues to grow, it can get more and more challenging to find and re-purpose existing images and videos. Consistent asset metadata can facilitate efficient reuse, without slowing you down from the unnecessary back-and-forth work.
Learn how you can leverage structured metadata to make it easier to find and re-purpose assets.
https://info.cloudinary.com/Add-structure-to-your-digital-asset-metadata.html
3. Agenda
- What is metadata?
- Why manage metadata?
- Whose job is it?
- How does Cloudinary help?
- Demo
- Best practices
- Q&A
4. Metadata is data about other data
What is Metadata?
Technical metadata
Camera’s model Date
File format
File size
Location
DPI
Dots Per Inch
Orientation
Horizontal/Vertical
Resolution
Video duration
Title Description Photographer name
Product ID
Keywords
Descriptive metadata
Category
Source
Licence type
Rights Expiration
5. Why manage Metadata?
Enrich search and
discoverability
Manage administrative
processes
Establish control and
consistency
Enable system
interoperability
6. Manipulate &
Transform
Upload &
Store
Search
Share &
Collaborate
Manage &
Organize
Optimize & Deliver
Engage &
Measure
Web & Mobile engineering
Asset managers
Photographer / External agency
Digital marketing / E-comm / Product managers / Merchandising
Dynamic DAM
The Metadata Team – Whose Job Is It Anyway?
7. Metadata Management with Cloudinary
● Extract and store embedded metadata
● Leverage AI to add content-relevant tags
● Create custom fields to add more structure
9. Metadata Best Practices
- Don’t create too many fields. Create a field only if you need its data to be searchable
- Enforce a rule of adding metadata during upload
- Always add the source/owner /creator of assets
- Add copyrights information for licensed assets to prevent any misuse
- Assign predefined values in a drop-down with commonly used terms for consistency
- Set important fields to be mandatory. For example, set “source” to be a mandatory
- Don’t give a hard limitation when it’s not necessary.
- String type: Don’t add character limitations that are too tight.
- Number type: Don’t limit the maximum and minimum to be too tight.
Hello everyone…. and Welcome to the webinar on “Adding Structure to Metadata"
My name is Alok and I'm a Product Marketing Manager at Cloudinary. I’ll be the host and speaker for today’s webinar
Before we start, just a few housekeeping items:
- This webinar is interactive. so we encourage you to submit any questions you might have and they'll addressed towards the end of the webinar.
- We will be recording the webinar for future viewing so all attendees will receive this recording in a follow-up email
Moving on to the fun stuff, here's the agenda of the webinar,
- We'll start with a quick explanation of 'What is Metadata'
- And then talk about Why managing metadata is important
- followed by some thoughts on Whose job is it anyway
- Then talking about How does Cloudinary enable you to effectively manage metadata
- And then for a little show and tell, we'll go over a product demo
- Followed by some recommended best practices
- And then we'll have some time for Q&A
So, what is metadata - the standard definition says it's data about data. So when it comes to digital asset management, metadata explains the context and content of images, videos, and other rich media assets.
It can be classified into different types - based on where it's stored and the purpose
Technical metadata: describes the physical properties of a digital asset, such as file type, format, resolution, location and date of where and when the photo was taken
Technical metadata is usually embedded into the asset and can travel with the asset.
Descriptive metadata: describes the content and context of the asset in the form of title, related product or campaign, content description in the form of keywords and also administrative information such as source, license, and copyrights of assets
Descriptive metadata lives inside a database and doesn't travel around with the asset
So why is metadata so important? Generally speaking, it enables effective management in a few different ways
Enriching search and discoverability
If you or someone on your team has experienced a '“Can’t find anything!”' moment then structured metadata can eliminate that frustration.
Establishing control and consistency
- As you use more and more images and video and your media library continues to grow, with metadata assigned to each asset, everyone can find and re-purpose assets efficiently. This means no unnecessary back and forth, or wasting resources on re-creating an asset when an existing asset could have been used.
Establishing control and consistency
When different people add values to a field, it can lead to inconsistencies, for example some people might use abbreviations, some might spell it out, some people would use a regional description. For example airplane vs. aeroplane, or autumn vs fall collection and so on
- With structured metadata, you can have a defined set of values in order to establish control and consistency across the organization.
Managing administrative processes
If you use licensed assets, it's important to track copyrights and ownership to avoid any violation of terms and services.
- You can enforce a general practice of adding the licensing information with mandatory metadata fields for source or expiration date.
And enabling system interoperability
if you have multiple systems in your technology stack, which is very common, and different information is stored in different systems - for example in a specific use-case product information can be stored in a PIM system and assets can be stored in a DAM system. Structured metadata can enable you to connect both the systems so you can map the product information such as the product ID or name or availability to it's images and videos, which could enable some sophisticated use-cases such as dynamic product badging.
So, who is responsible for metadata management?
In a linear workflow, some organizations have a librarian who is responsible for defining, enforcing, and managing metadata. But if you think of a modern asset lifecycle, images and videos flow through different teams and functions including creative, marketing, and web or development teams before making it to customers. So in some shape or form, everyone that is involved in creating, managing, and using these asset would and should be responsible for metadata management. Say the creative team can enter information on licensing and usage terms, marketing team can enter information related to the associated product or campaign and so on. The DAM admin or someone in a similar role can decide the schema, at what point different functions can add their respective metadata, the obligation to use: whether it should be mandatory or optional, and overall governance.
But remember It's take a team to effective manage and maintain metadata
With Cloudinary, metadata can be managed across three aspects:
Extracting and storing embedded metadata
Using AI to add content-relevant tags
Creating custom fields for adding more structure
And to wrap up, here are some recommended best practices and you think about the application of structured metadata to your assets.