Optimise your media with smart tags
Metadata – the art of ‘tagging’ your photos, films and music with extra information to help identify it – may not sound like the sexiest of subjects, but when you’re setting up a new media server or wanting to browse your photos through an app like Shotwell, you can instantly recognise your files and organise them as you see fit.
Metadata is, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, “data information that provides information about other data”. The other data in this case is your media files; the data information is everything from a TV show’s episode title to the composer of a music track. Broadly speaking, metadata resides in one of two places: within the database of a related program such as your music player or media server, or embedded in the file itself as a series of keyword ‘tags’. Often, program metadata is richer than the tags embedded in files – just look at the kind of information supplied by the likes of () or ( ) in terms of detailed synopses, cast and crew information and artwork. While you’re able to edit all these by hand, most of it is downloaded – or ‘scraped’
