---
title: "Metadata explained"
slug: "metadata-explained"
updated: 2026-10-21T21:06:21Z
published: 2026-10-21T21:06:21Z
canonical: "help.ipv.com/metadata-explained"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.ipv.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Metadata explained

Asset metadata provides descriptive or structural information about assets in Curator. This helps in searching, organising, understanding, and managing assets in Curator. The articles in this section explain how to use the [default metadata](/docs/default-metadata), [view](/docs/viewing-asset-metadata) and [edit](/docs/edit-asset-metadata) asset metadata, and [filter](/docs/filters) assets by metadata.

#### What is metadata?

Metadata is information about an asset: what it shows, when and how it was made, and how it can be used. Good metadata makes assets easier to search for, filter and manage.

Curator holds two broad kinds of metadata for each asset:

- **Technical metadata**, such as duration, resolution, frame rate and codec. Curator reads this from the file when the asset is ingested.
- **Descriptive metadata**, such as title, description and keywords. Users add and edit this in Clip Link, and some of it can be filled in when the asset is ingested.

The fields you can see and edit depend on how your system administrator has set up metadata and metadata permissions in Curator System Administrator.

To apply hierarchical (dependent) metadata to several assets at once, see [Batch Editing](/docs/batch-editing).